LLLLQ  SA 


SOCIALISM 
AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 


SOCIALISM  AND 
PERSONAL    LIBERTY 


BY 

ROBERT  DELL 


"If  ye  learn  to  walk  in  the  perfect  law  of  liberty, 
ye  shall  do  well." 


NEW  YORK 

THOMAS  SELTZER,  INC. 

5  WEST  50th  STREET 
1922 


NOTE 

READERS  of  My  Second  Country  will  find  that  the 
opinion  that  I  expressed  in  that  book  about  the 
dictatorship  of  the  proletariat  as  a  method  of 
transition  from  capitalist  to  Socialist  Society  is 
modified  here.  The  reasons  for  that  modification, 
arising  from  the  experience  of  the  dictatorship 
of  the  proletariat  in  Russia,  are  explained  in  the 
chapter  on  the  subject. 

I  would  warn  the  reader  that  the  descriptions 
of  various  Socialist  systems  given  in  the  present 
book  are  necessarily  very  summary  and  incom- 
plete and  need  to  be  supplemented.  It  is  not  my 
purpose  to  give  a  complete  exposition  of  Socialist 
theory,  nor  would  that  be  possible  within  the  limits 
of  a  small  volume.  All  that  I  have  been  able  or 
have  tried  to  do  is  to  touch  on  the  various  theories 
merely  in  their  relation  to  the  particular  question 
of  personal  liberty. 

R.  D. 

5003 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  I.  PAGE 

"'THE  CONDITIONS  OF  PERSONAL  LIBERTY    ...         9 

/  CHAPTER  II. 

THE  NECESSITY  OF  ECONOMIC  FREEDOM  18 

CHAPTER  III. 
DEMOCRATISM 35 

CHAPTER   IV. 
SPURIOUS  SOCIALISMS 47 

CHAPTER  V. 
MARXIST  SOCIALISM 61 

CHAPTER  VI. 
DICTATORSHIP  OF  THE  PROLETARIAT  ....        72 

CHAPTER  VII. 
REVOLUTIONARY  SYNDICALISM 101 

CHAPTER  VIII. 
LIBERTARIAN  SOCIALISM        .        .        .        .        .        .122 


SOCIALISM 
AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

CHAPTER  I. 

THE  CONDITIONS  OF  PERSONAL  LIBERTY. 

ONE  of  the  greatest  obstacles  to  the  progress  of 
Socialist  ideas  is  the  fear  that  Socialism  would 
destroy  personal  liberty.  Tjie  objection  is  not 
met _  by  pointing  out  that  for  the  large  majority 
of  mankind  personal  liberty  does  not  really  exist 
in  present^ economic  conditions.  That  is  true  ;  but 
the  fact  that  it  is  true  is  one  of  the  strongest  reasons 
for  altering  the  conditions.  Socialism  is  not  pre- 
sented in  a  very  attractive  guise  by  the  argument 
that  it  would  be  no  worse  than  the  present  social 
system.  A  prisoner  would,  no  doubt,  be  gratified 
by  the  news  that  he  was  about  to  be  transferred 
to  a  more  comfortable  prison  where  the  food  was 
better  and  more  abundant,  but  he  would  not  be 
aroused  to  the  same  enthusiasm  as  if  he  were  told 
that  he  was  about  to  be  set  free.  The  enthusiasm 
for  Socialism  now  felt  by  a  minority  of  the  workers 
will  spread  to  the  large  majority  only  when  they  are 
convinced  that  Socialism  is  really  a  path  to  freedom. 
"  The  proletarians  have  nothing  to  lose  but  their 
chains,"  but  they  want  to  be  sure  that  they  will 
not  merely  exchange  their  chains  for  others  of  a 
different  pattern. 


10    SOCIALISM;  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

Too  many  Socialists  even  gladly  admit  that 
Socialism  and  personal  liberty  are  incompatible. 
Nothing  has  done  more  to  damp  enthusiasm  for 
the  Russian  revolution  than  the  discovery  that 
personal  liberty  has  been  suppressed  in  Russia. 
It  is  possible,  of  course,  to  point  out  that  existing 
conditions  in  Russia  are  not  necessary  consequences 
!  of  a  social  revolution ;  that  Russia  was  of  all 
European  countries  the  least  suited  to  a  Socialist 
experiment ;  and  that  the  great  difficulties  arising 
from  its  backward  state  of  economic  development 
and  the  ignorance  and  barbarism  of  the  majority 
of  its  population  have  been  increased  by  foreign 
interference.  But  our  "  pure  "  Communist  friends 
will  have  no  such  excuses.  They  hold  up  the 
present  Russian  system  as  the  only  possible  Social- 
ist system  and  the  ideal  for  every  other  country 
to  aim  at.  A  prominent  member  of  the  Communist 
Party  of  Great  Britain  wrote  to  me  in  1920  that 
he  quite  agreed  with  a  remark  of  mine  that  "  the 
servile  State  was  no  imaginary  danger,"  but  for 
his  part  he  would  welcome  it.  I  have,  however, 
usually  found  that  the  apostles  of  "  irdn  discipline  " 
tacitly  assume  that  it  will  be  exercised  by  them- 
selves and  imposed  on  others. 

This  strange  hatred  of  liberty  for  its  own  sake 
ignores  reality.  For,  as  Henri  Barbusse  has  said, 
"  the  human  reality  is  the  individual  "  and  an 
attempt  to  base  a  social  order  on  the  ignoring  of 
that  fact  would  be  Utopian,  for  it  would  run  counter 
to  a  fundamental  tendency  of  human  nature. 
V  "  Every  collective  organisation  of  men  must  come 

^^  i^>^^&^^ 


CONDITIONS  OF  PERSONAL  LIBERTY    11 

back  to  the  individual  man,  be  quickened  by  the 
individual  life,  and  respect  individual  autonomy 
to  the  fullest  possible  extent."*  The  desire  for 
liberty  is  a  fundamental  tendency  of  human" 
nature._,A  man  that  does  not  care  whether  he 
is  free  or  not  is  not  normal.  The  desire  for  liberty 
may  be  crushed  out  by  generations  of  submission 
to  authority,  as  it  is  bred  out  of  the  caged  bird,  but 
it  is  never  entirely  bred  out  of  the  human  heart. 
Even  in  men  born  slaves  it  is  dormant  and  can 
be  awakened.  Of  what  use,  we  are  sometimes 
asked,  is  liberty  to  a  starving  man  ?  Obviously 
of  no  use  at  all,  since  nothing  is  of  any  use  to 
him  but  food.  But,  although  man  cannot  live 
without  bread,  he  does  not  live  by  bread  alone. 
One  of  the  worst  infamies  of  our  existing  social 
system  is  that  so  many  people  are  preoccupied 
so  exclusively  by  the  necessity  of  getting  their 
bread,  and  the  constant  uncertainty  as  to  whether 
they  will  get  it  or  not,  that  they  cannot  concern 
themselves  with  anything  else.  Such  people  exist : 
they  can  hardly  be  said  to  live.  If  they  were 
offered  enough  to  eat  and  drink  for  the  rest  of  their 
lives  at  the  price  of  certain  restrictions  on  their 
liberty,  they  might  well  accept  the  offer.  But, 
when  once  they  were  relieved  from  anxiety  about 
their  daily  bread,  they  would  demand  liberty. 
Many  modern  free  workers  are  less  well  fed  and 
housed  than  were  mediaeval  serfs  or  American 
slaves ;  but  both  serfs  and  slaves  eventually 
demanded  their  liberty.  Many  negroes  in  the 
*  La  Lueur  dans  VAbime,  p.  72.  Paris  :  Editions  Clart6,  1920. 


12    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 


United  States  live  in  worse  material  conditions 
than  their  slave  great-grandfathers,  but  not  one 
of  them  would  go  back  to  slavery. 

The  desire  for  liberty  is  not  an  exclusively 
human  instinct ;  it  exists  among  all  the  higher 
animals.  A  wild  bird  caught  and  caged  has 
greater  security  than  in  freedom.  It  is  in  no 
danger  of  dying  of  cold  or  hunger,  or  of  falling 
a  prey  to  a  hawk.  But,  in  the  effort  to  get  free, 
it  will  beat  its  wings  against  the  bars  of  the  cage 
until  it  breaks  them  and  perhaps  kills  itself.  It 
prefers  death  to  slavery.  We  shall  make  a  mistake 
if  we  attempt  to  base  any  social  order  on  the 
assumption  that  the  love  of  liberty  is  less  deeply 
rooted  in  the  nature  of  men  than  in  that  of  birds. 

We  must,  then,  start  with  the  individual,  but  we 
cannot  end  with  him,  for  we  have  perforce  to  con- 
sider him  in  his  social  relations  with  other  indi- 
viduals. To  quote  Henri  Barbusse  again  : — 

"  The  pure  anarchist  doctrine  .  .  .  right  as  it 
is  in  revolting  against  certain  anti-individualist 
forces,  is  only  destructive  and  negative.  ...  It  is 
impossible  to  base  calculations  on  the  figure :  one. 
The  idea  of  liberty  by  itself  has  no  dimensions."* 

Liberty  becomes  positive  only  when  the  indi- 
vidual isregarded  in  his  relations  with  society" 
that  ispwith  the  totality  of  individuajs._^b^ojute_ 
^personal  liberty  js^thenature  of  things  impossible, 
*  except  so  far  as  opinion  is  concerned,  since  several 
absolute    liberties    cannot    exist    together.     The 
liberty  of  each    individual    is    necessarily  limited 
*  La  Lueur  dans  VAUme,  p  73.     Paris  :  Editions  Clart£,  1920. 


CONDITIONS  OF  PERSONAL  LIBERTY   13 

b^_that_o_f  the  others.  But  it  does  not  follow  that 
any  and  every  interference  with  personal  liberty 
is  permissible  in  the  supposed  interest  of  the 
collectivity.  Experience  has  shown  that  the  real 
and  ultimate  interest  of  all  is  to  secure  to  each  the 
maximum  of  liberty,  or,  in  the  words  of  Henri 
Barbusse,  "  to  use  a  much  more  concrete  expres- 
sion, the  minimum  of  constraint."  And  it  is 
possible  to  define  the  minimum  of  constrain 

^^^&*f**  *•"•"• •* 

/The  irreducible  minimum  is  such  constraint  as 
I  may  be  necessary  to  prevent  an  individual  from 
I  so  using  his  liberty  as  to  interfere  with  the  liberty 

Vpr  the  rights  of  others. 

\^ 

rfo  expression  of  opinion  can  interfere  with 
liberty  or  the  rights  of  others.  For  that  reason 
liberty  of  opinion  alone  can  and  should  be  absolute. 
The  basis  of  liberty  of  opinion  is  not  any  supposed 
natural  right,  nor  any  certainty  that,  if  opinion 
be  free,  the  truth  will  always  prevail.  Perhaps  the 
truth  prevails  in  the  long  run — I  think  it  does — 
but  it  is  sometimes  a  very  long  run.  The  ground 
for  giving  absolute  liberty  of  opinion  is  simply  the 
fact  that  nobody  is  infallible,  not  even  the  pro- 
letariat or  the  people  collectively.  The  claim  to 
have  the  right  to  suppress  opinion  is,  in  fact,  a 
claim  to  infallibility,  and  the  suppression  or  per- 
secution of  opinion  is  justifiable  only  on  the 
part  of  persons  believing  themselves  to  be  infal- 
lible, or  to  be  the  representatives  of  an  infallible 
organisation. 

The  Catholic  Church  is  quite  right,  from  its  point 
of  view,  to  refuse  liberty  of  opinion.     Professing, 


14    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

as  it  does,  to  know  the  absolute  truth  about  religion 
and  morals — which  means,  in  effect,  about  nearly 
everything — it  would  fail  in  its  duty  if  it  tolerated 
error.  Its  theologians  are,  therefore,  reasonable 
and  logical  when  they  teach  that  error  can  be 
tolerated  only  from  motives  of  expediency — that  is, 
in  plain  English,  when  the  Church  is  not  strong 
enough  to  persecute  successfully.  Error,  they  say, 
is  religious  or  moral  or  intellectual  poison  which  can 
be  insidiously  instilled  into  the  minds  of  the  faithful. 
The  flaw  in  the  analogy  is  that  poison  can  be 
recognised  with  certainty,  whereas  error  cannot  be. 
However  strong  our  convictions,  we  must  always 
admit  the  possibility  that  we  may  be  mistaken. 
At  best,  our  convictions  are  extremely  probable 
hypotheses  ;  they  can  never  be  certainties,  even 
if  we  are  ready  to  die  for  them,  for  there  is  no 
certainty  in  this  world,  whatever  there  may  be 
in  any  others.  If,  therefore,  we  attempt  to  sup- 
press an  opinion,  we  run  the  risk  of  suppressing 
what  may,  after  all,  turn  out  to  be  true  and  even 
of  inestimable  value.  And  it  is  better  on  the 
whole  to  run  the  risk  of  tolerating  a  harmful 
opinion  than  that  of  suppressing  a  beneficial 
one. 

That  is  the  experience  of  the  past.  The  perse- 
cuted have  more  often  turned  out  to  be  right  than 
the  persecutors.  Moreover,  it  is  so  difficult  to  be 
quite  sure  that  one  is  actuated  solely  by  concern 
for  the  truth  in  suppressing  an  opinion  that  one 
dislikes.  Too  often,  however  unconsciously,  perse- 
cutors have  confused  concern  for  the  truth  with 


CONDITIONS  OF  PERSONAL  LIBERTY    15 

concern  for  their  own  vested  interests,  which  a 
particular  opinion  threatened.  That  element  is 
not  entirely  absent  from  Catholic  intolerance, 
for  it  is  evident  that  the  whole  clergy,  from  the 
Pope  downwards,  have  a  strong  vested  interest  in 
Catholicism.  Being  human  beings,  they  must  be 
unconsciously  influenced  by  it,  just  as  lawyers, 
doctors,  and  every  other  body  of  men  with  cor- 
porate interests  cannot  help  being  biassed  in  regard 
to  any  proposed  change  that  touches  them.  So 
any  Government  that  suppresses  opinion  hostile 
to  itself  may  think  that  it  is  considering  only  the 
public  welfare,  but  is  certainly  influenced  to  some 
extent  by  consideration  for  its  own  position. 

A  majority  is  no  more  infallible  than  a  minority 
and,  therefore,  no  more  justified  in  refusing  liberty 
of  opinion.  The  fact  that  an  opinion  is  held  by  an 
overwhelming  majority,  even  amounting  almost 
to  unanimity,  is  no  proof  that  it  is  true.  On  the 
contrary,  although  minorities  are  not  always 
right,  those  that  are  right  are  always  in  a  minority 
to  begin  with.  For  new  opinions  are  always  held 
at  first  by  a  minority,  and  some  new  opinions  are 
right.  It  is  precisely  the  opinions  that  are  held 
by  small  minorities  and  seem  to  the  majority 
blasphemous,  or  immoral,  or  dangerous  to  society, 
that  need  to  be  protected.  Liberty  of  opinion 
is  the  most  precious  of  all  liberties,  for  it  is  con- 
cerned with  the  one  attribute  that  raises  man  above 
all  other  animals — the  human  reason.  ^ 

X***In  fact,  even  the  pure  anarchist  does  not  deny  \ 
f  that  absolute  liberty,  except  in  matters  of  opinion,  J 


16    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

is  impossible.  He  objects  to  the  use  of  any  con- 
straint, "Because  he  believes  that,  when  all  con- 
straint is  done  away  with,  individuals  will  volun- 
tarily restrain  themselves  and  respect  the  rights 
and  liberty  of  others.  There  is  an  element  of 
truth  in  the  anarchist  theory.  It  is  because  of 
the  law  that  offences  come :  the  mere  fact  that 
an  action  is  forbidden  makes  it  attractive  to  normal 
people.  Perhaps  the  most  effective  method  of 
diminishing  vice  would  be  to  make  virtue  illegal. 
It  is  for  this  reason  that  persecution,  unless  it  is 
carried  to  the  length  of  extermination,  usually 
advances  the  cause  of  the  persecuted.  When  it 
does  so,  that  is  no  sort  of  evidence  that  the  cause 
is  a  good  one.  Bad  causes  have  had  as  many 
martyrs  as  good.  Nevertheless,  although  it  is 
probable  that,  in  the  case  of  civilised  peoples, 
the  less  government,  the  fewer  laws,  and  the  less 
constraint  there  are,  the  better  people  will  behave, 
we  have  not  yet  reached  a  sufficiently  high  level  of 
civilisation  to  do  away  with  constraint  altogether. 

Certain  questions  are,  of  course,  raised  by  the 
application  of  the  principle  of  personal  liberty, 
as  I  have  defined  it,  to  particular  cases.  One 
of  those  cases  is  that  of  children.  Any  inter- 
ference with  the  supposed  rights  of  parents  over 
their  children  is  sometimes  denounced  as  an 
infringement  of  personal  liberty.  The  most  ex- 
treme advocates  of  parental  rights  would  hardly 
maintain  that  parents  have  the  right  to  treat 
their  children  exactly  as  they  please — to  ill-treat 
them  systematically,  for  example.  But  the  doctrine 


CONDITIONS  OF  PERSONAL  LIBERTY  17 

that  a  child  belongs  to  his  parents  is  too  common. 
It  is  sometimes  met  by  the  opposite  doctrine  that 
a  child  belongs  to  the  community.  A  child  belongs 
neither  to  his  parents,  nor  to  the  community  :  he 
belongs  to  himself.  And  the  liberty  of  a  child 
should  be  respected — his  future  liberty.  It  is  the 
business  of  the  community  to  see  that  it  is  respected 
and  to  defend  it,  if  necessary,  against  the  parents. 
Theoretically,  for  example,  it  would  be  justifiable 
to  forbid  parents  to  give  any  religious  teaching 
to  their  children,  on  the  ground  that  it  is  taking 
an  unfair  advantage  of  a  child  to  prejudice  his  mind 
in  advance  at  an  impressionable  age  by  imposing 
on  him  opinions  as  if  they  were  facts.  Practically, 
of  course,  such  a  prohibition  would  be  absurd, 
if  only  for  the  reason  that  it  could  not  possibly 
be  enforced.  But  it  is  possible  to  make  the  schools 
neutral,  as  the  French  say,  in  matters  of  religion, 
and  quite  justifiable.  To  allow  no  religious  teaching 
in  schools,  even  if  some  parents  desire  it,  is  a  per- 
missible constraint.  For  it  prevents  to  that 
extent  parents  from  interfering  with  the  liberty  of 
their  children  by  depriving  them  of  the  freedom 
to  make  their  own  choice,  when  their  intellectual 
development  enables  them  to  do  so.  That  is  true 
of  many  other  forms  of  interference  with  the  liberty 
of  parents  in  dealing  with  their  children,  which  is 
no  more  absolute  than  any  other  liberty  and  is 
limited  by  the  liberty  of  the  child.  Until  the  child 
becomes  old  enough  to  defend  and  exercise  his 
liberty,  it  is  the  duty  of  the  community  to  defend 
it. 


CHAPTER  II. 

t 

THE  NECESSITY  OF  ECONOMIC  FREEDOM. 

THE  conception  of  personal  liberty  set  forth  in  the 
previous  chapter  is  that  of  all  liberals,  but  liberals 
make  the  mistake  of  assuming  that  it  can  be  realised 
merely  by  the  absence  of  legal  restrictions  on 
liberty.  They  do  not  take  into  account  the  fact 
that  certain  economic  conditions  are  necessary 
to  make  liberty  positive.  Legal  constraint  is 
not  the  only  form  of  constraint ;  economic  con- 
straint is  even  more  effective.  We  are  all  legally 
free  to  travel  round  the  world  (barring  present 
passport  regulations),  but  most  of  us  are  not 
really  free  to  do  so,  since  we  have  not  the  neces- 
sary money.  ^The  minimum  of  constraint  for 
each  individual  can,  therefore,  be  secured  only  by 
equality  of  economic  conditions.1'  Without  that 
the  constraint  cannot  be  the  same  for  all.  Those 
in  a^rivileged  economic  position  will  be  subject 
to  the  minimum  of  constraint  and  the  rest  of  man- 
kind to  the  maximum.  For  example,  in  present 
economic  conditions,  a  few  are  exempt  from  the 
natural  obligation  of  working  for  their  living, 
while  the  vast  majority  are  subject  to  it.  The 
few  are  thus  free  from  a  constraint  that  is  naturally 
universal ;  the  many  are  not.  The  few  are  econo- 

18 


NECESSITY  OF  ECONOMIC  FREEDOM  19 

mically  independent ;    the  many  are  not.      That 
fact  is  recognised  in  the  common  phrase  : 
of  independent  means." 

InjheMiddle  Ages  it  was  evident  that  the  many 
were  not  free.  Guizot  said  that  the  feudal  system 
wns  n,  rnn fusion  of  property  wifh  prithority,  but 
was  it  not  rather  a  frank  and  brutal  admission  of  th 


b  property  confers  authority  ?     The  owner- 

ship_^TTand  was  the  privilege  of  a  particular  class     . 

it  legal  authority]    "l^he  feultatyl>£# 

of/      \l 


was  obliged  to  assign  an  allotmentto  each 
his  serfs,  which  tfrpy  miltivatftH  for  theirown  support  / 

and  that  of  their  families,  but  in  return  the  serfs  /?£  T* 
wprp  obliged  to  cultivate  the  personal  domain,  of 
their  lord,  who  could  exact  from  them  any,  other 
services  and  any  taxes  that  he  pleased.  tThp  serfs 
formed  in  a  very  literal  sense  a  proletariat,  for 
they  were  legally  disqualified  from  owning  property 
and,  if  they  managed  to  acquire  any  personal 
prop.ej±Vjzrrin_no- .xjase  could  they  own  land — it 
death  to  t.heir  lord. 


There  was  no  freedom  in  mediaeval  industry. 
Nobody  could  set  up  in  any  trade  without  passing 
through  an  apprenticeship,  which  qualified  him 
to  be  a  "  master  "  in  his  craft.  This  regulation 
had  originally  the  admirable  object  of  ensuring  that 
a  man  should  know  his  trade  thoroughly,  but  in 
practice  it  had  other  objects.  When  one  finds, 
for  instance,  that  in  France  it  took  twelve  years 
to  qualify  as  a  maker  of  glass  beads,  one  is  obliged 
to  conclude  with  Professor  Guerard  that  apprentice- 
ship "was  really  a  form  of  exacting  a  premium,  in  the 


20    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

form  of  free  service,  in  addition  to  the  cash  premium 
which  was  generally  stipulated."*  The  "  varlets  " 
or  workmen  were  not  free,  for  they  could  offer 
their  services  only  to  a  recognised  master  belonging 
to  one  of  the  gilds  and  were  forbidden  to  work  for 
the  general  public.  Naturally,  the  masters  could 
impose  their  own  terms  and  wages  were  kept  down 
to  the  bare  subsistence  level.  In  the  earlier  days 
of  the  gilds  any  varlet  could  become  a  master, 
provided  "  he  knew  the  trade  and  had  the  where- 
withal " — that  is,  the  necessary  capital,  usually, 
no  doubt,  small — and  passed  a  practical  test  by 
producing  a  "  masterpiece,"  that  is,  a  specimen  of 
his  work  good  enough  to  qualify  him  as  a  master. 
But,  as  time  went  on,  the  number  of  masters  in 
each  gild  was  limited ;  the  masters'  sons,  who  had 
always  been  favoured,  were  alone  accepted  as 
apprentices  ;  no  varlet  had  the  smallest  chance  of 
becoming  a  master ;  and  the  gilds  became  almost 
entirely  hereditary  and  nests  of  privilege  and 
vested  interests.  Indeed,  if  one  were  asked  to 
sum  up  in  a  sentence  the  chief  economic  character- 
istic of  the  Middle  Ages,  one  would  say  that  they 
were  above  all  the  age  of  vested  interests. 

There  were  vested  interests  in  other  than  econ- 
omic concerns.  Education  was  an  ecclesiastical 
monopoly.  There  was  no  liberty  of  opinion  and 
repression  delayed  the  progress  of  science  for 
centuries.  The  Church,  although  it  sometimes 
defended  the  serfs  against  excessive  exactions, 

*  French  Civilisation  from  its  Origins  to  the  Close  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  p.  266.  London  :  Fisher  Unwin,  1920. 


NECESSITY  OF  ECONOMIC  FREEDOM  21 

usually  sided  with  the  owners  of  property  and  did 
so  more  and  more  as  time  went  on.  It  could 
hardly  do  otherwise,  since  it  was  itself  the  largest 
owner  of  property.  In  France,  at  one  time,  a  third 
of  the  land  belonged  to  the  Church.  Hence  the 
uncompromising  opposition  of  the  Church  to  the 
remarkable  communal  movement  in  France  in 
the  twelfth  century,  which,  had  it  survived,  might 
have  changed  the  whole  history  of  France  and 
advanced  the  political  evolution  of  Europe  by 
centuries.  The  popular  epics  and  tales  of  the 
Middle  Ages  suggest  that  the  people  recognised 
their  oppressors  and  that  the  clergy  were  rather 
feared  than  loved.  The  villain  of  most  of  them 
is  an  ecclesiastic,  and  one  gets  the  impression  that 
for  the  mediaeval  story-writer  there  were  three 
degrees  of  comparison  in  rascality :  the  secular 
priest,  the  monk,  the  friar. 

Mediaeval  civilisation,  as  Gaston  Paris  has  shown, 
died  a  natural  death  early  in  the  fourteenth  cen- 
tury and  was  thenceforth  only  a  rotting  corpse.  The 
causes,  chiefly  economic,  that  broke  up  mediaeval 
society  also  produced  the  Renaissance,  when  the 
individual  burst  the  bars  of  his  mediaeval  cage 
and  soared  out  into  the  wide  horizon.  That 
wonderful  age  was  the  glorious  youth  of  modern 
civilisation,  as  the  Middle  Ages  had  been  its  child- 
hood. The  cause  of  personal  liberty  seemed  to 
have  finally  triumphed  and  man  rejoiced  in  his 
new-found  freedom.  But  the  Reformation  and 
the  Counter-Reformation  once  more  imposed 
shackles  on  his  reason,  and  economic  conditions 


22    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

forged  new  bars  to  confine  him.  The  ownership 
of  property  ceased  to  confer  legal  authority,  but 
it  continued  to  confer  effective  power.  The  fact 
that  it  became  legal  for  everybody  to  own  land  or 
any  other  form  of  property  did  not  secure  property 
to  everybody.  Men  no  longer  owned  land  because 
they  belonged  to  a  particular  class,  but  they 

'v  belonged  to  a  class  because  they  owned  land,  for 
they  were  still  the  rare  exceptions.  In  a  word,  the 
mere  abolition  of  legal  restrictions  did  not  secure 
economic  liberty. 

The  serfs  were  freed,  but  they  still  had  to  main- 
tain their  landlord  out  of  the  fruits  of  their  labour. 
Instead  of  the  services  and  taxes  that  the  feudal 

<  lord  had  imposed,  a  fixed  rent  was  exacted  for 
the  use  of  the  land.  Moreover,  the  freed  serfs  lost 
in  security.  The  feudal  lord  had  been  obliged  to 
assign  them  land  to  cultivate  for  themselves  ;  the 
new  landlord  was  under  no  such  obligation.  He 
could,  if  he  pleased,  refuse  to  let  land  to  anybody 
on  any  terms,  and  sometimes  did  so,  when  he 
wanted  the  land  for  his  own  pleasure.  What 
greater  restriction  of  personal  liberty  could  there 
be  than  the  power  of  a  few  to  deny  to  others  the 
right  to  use  the  land,  that  is,  the  right  to  exist  ? 
There  can  be  no  economic  freedom  without  access 
to  the  land.  The  owners  of  the  larid  are  as 
truly  the  masters  of  the  rest  of  <the  community 
as  the  feudal  lords  were  the  masters  of  their  serfs. 
If  one  man  owns  a  whole  village,  his  authority 
over  its  inhabitants  is  no  less  real,  although  it  is 
less  extensive,  than  that  of  a  feudal  lord  over  his 


NECESSITY  OF  ECONOMIC  FREEDOM  23 

serfs.  The  inhabitants  are  legally  free  to  leave  the 
village  as  the  serfs  were  not,  but,  in  fact,  they  may 
not  be  free  to  leave  it,  for  their  circumstances  may 
be  such  that  they  would  be  ruined  by  moving. 
Or  it  might  mean  leaving  homes  in  which  their 
families  had  lived  for  generations.  They  have  not 
even  liberty  of  opinion,  for  the  owner  of  a  village 
can  expel  anybody  for  his  political  or  religious 
opinions  and  has  often  done  so. 

The  landlord  has,  in  practice,  the  power  to 
legislate  by  decree.  I  knew  a  village  in  Surrey, 
about  a  quarter  of  a  century  ago,  where  it  was  a 
rule  imposed  by  the  landowner  that  every  girl 
should  go  out  to  service  at  the  age  of  fifteen.  As 
the  rule  was  strictly  enforced,  any  family  that 
disobeyed  it  had  to  go.  Many  Parisian  owners 
of  house  property  object  to  families  with  more  than 
one  or  two  children — sometimes  to  any  children  at 
all.  Some  seven  or  eight  years  ago  one  or  two 
large  families  found  themselves  homeless  because  no 
landlord  would  let  them  a  tenement.  There  was  a 
public  scandal,  and  a  demand  for  legislation  on 
the  matter.  But  no  legislation  could  touch  it,  unless 
it  were  enacted  that  no  landlord  should  refuse  to 
let  to  a  large  family  in  any  circumstances.  For  a 
landlord  has  the  right  to  refuse  to  let  without 
giving  any  reason  at  all.  And,  so  long  as  private 
property  in  land  continues,  he  must  have  that  right. 

The  liberty  of  certain  individuals  to  own  land,  v 
therefore,  interferes  with  the  liberty  of  others —  I 
indeed,  it  deprives  of  liberty  all  that  do  not  own  it.  I 
Land  is  a  natural  monopoly:  its  quantity  is  fixed  and  / 


24    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

cannot  be  increased.  According  to  liberal  principles, 
there  should  be  no  private  monopoly.  A  liberal  that 
is  true  to  his  principles  cannot,  therefore,  support 
private  property  in  land.  There  is  no  way  of  giving 
equal  access  to  the  land  other  than  that  of  making 
it  common  property.  It  is  impossible  to  divide  it 
up  into  small  pieces  and  give  everybody  a  piece. 
Moreover,  since  the  economic  value  of  the  different 
pieces  would  vary  enormously,  such  a  division 
would  be  unjust.  The  collective  ownership  of  the  ' 
land  is  an  essential  condition  of  economic  freedom. 
What  is  true  of  land  is  now  equally  true  of  the 
other  means  of  production :  they  are  private 
monopolies  in  the  hands  of  a  few.  That  was  not 
the  case  when  individual  production  was  the  rule 
and  a  man  could  start  in  a  trade  on  his  own  account 
with  little  more  capital  than  sufficed  to  buy  his 
tools.  The  invention  of  machinery  and  the  indus- 
trial revolution  changed  the  nature  of  private 
property.  Small  property  was  replaced  by  mono- 
polist or  bourgeois  property  in  the  means  of  pro- 
duction. The  very  condition  of  the  existence  of 
bourgeois  property  is  the  deprivation  of  the  great 
majority  of  any  property  at  all.  Limited  liability 
has  made  huge  concentrations  of  capital  possible 
d  it  is  becoming  increasingly  difficult  for  an 
hdividual  to  start  on  his  own  account,  even  as 
employer.*  Industry  is  more  and  more  being 

*  M.  Henri  Lambert  has  shown  that  limited  liability  has  been 
a  much  more  important  factor  in  creating  capitalist  —  and 
particularly  financial — monopoly  than  economists  have  hitherto 
recognised.  (See  Le  Nouveau  Contrat  Social,  by  Henri  Lambert. 
Brussels  :  Maurice  Lamertin  ;  Paris  :  Felix  Alcan.) 


NECESSITY  OF  ECONOMIC  FREEDOM  25 

monopolised  by  trusts  and  combines,  many  of 
which  are  international,  so  that  competition 
between  capitalists  is  greatly  diminishing  and  tends 
to  disappear.  An  authority  so  little  suspect  of 
revolutionary  tendencies  as  Mr  Taft  has  declared 
that,  unless  some  restriction  were  placed  on  trusts, 
they  would  become  complete  monopolies  so  power- 
ful that  the  State  would  be  obliged  to  take  them 
over,  and  "  Socialism  would  be  the  necessary 
result."  Such  a  system  of  State  monopoly  would 
not  be  Socialism  in  the  traditional  sense  of  the 
term,  but  it  is  clear  that,  if  the  development  of 
the  modern  capitalist  system  continues  unchecked, 
it  will  end  in  a  servile  State,  controlled  by  a  few 
plutocrats,  such  as  Anatole  France  describes  in 
the  last  book  of  L'lle  des  Pingouins.  For,  asT" 
M.  Lambert  says,  our  present  system  is  financial 
rather  than  merely  capitalist.  Already  the 
countries  called  democratic  are,  in  fact,  passing 
more  and  more  under  the  control  of  an  oligarchy 
of  financiers.  That  is  particularly  the  case  in 
France  and  in  the  United  States  of  America, 
but  it  is  also,  to  a  great  extent,  the  case  in 
England.  It  is  inevitable,  for  property  confers  - 
authority.  Rich  and  poor,  as  Anatole  France^ 
says,  are  equal  before  the  law,  which  forbids  them  ' 
both  alike  to  sleep  under  a  bridge  or  to  steal  bread, 
but  this  negative  equality  hardly  affects  them  both 
equally.  And  it  is  a  poor  substitute  for  equality 
of  economic  conditions,  which  alone  has  any 
positive  value. 

"  The   system   of   producing   and   appropriating"* 


26    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

products  that  is  based  on  class  antagonisms"  is 
thus,  in  the  words  of  the  Communist  Manifesto  of 
1848,  reaching  "  its  final  and  most  complete 
expression."  And  its  final  and  most  complete 
expression  means  the  extinction  of  personal  liberty 
for  all  except  the  monopolists.  Even  on  the 
principles  of  the  economic  school  of  Manchester 
Liberalism  the  present  development  of  capitalism 
is  indefensible.  For  the  free  competition  on  which 
the  Manchester  Liberals  insist  is  being  replaced  by 
monopoly.  The  development  has  gone  furthest  in 
the  United  States,  where  the  minority  of  property- 
owners  is  very  small,  their  holdings  are  very 
large,  and  the  great  majority  even  of  men  earning 
large  incomes  are  employees  of  some  vast  capitalist 
concern.  A  system  that  makes  it  possible  for  a 
Rockefeller  to  have  an  income  of  £1000  an  hour 
needs  changing. 

The  industrial  revolution,  by  substituting  col- 
lective production  on  a  large  scale  for  individual 
production  in  all  the  important  industries,  has 
enormously  increased  the  number  of  persons  that 
"  have  no  means  of  subsistence  except  in  so  far 
as  they  find  work,  and  find  work  only  so  far  as  the 
work  is  profitable  to  capitalists  " — the  proletariat. 
Just  as  it  was  believed  that  everybody  would  be 
enabled  to  have  property  by  the  removal  of  the 
legal  restriction  to  a  particular  class  of  the  right 
to  own  it,  so  it  was  believed  that  the  workman 
would  be  given  freedom  by  the  removal  of  the 
restriction  obliging  him  to  work  only  for  certain 
individuals.  The  belief  was  as  much  a  delusion 


NECESSITY  OF  ECONOMIC  FREEDOM  27 

in  the  one  case  as  in  the  other,  for  in  both  cases 
the  liberty  is  negative.  The  workman,  it  was 
believed,  would  be  able  to  sell  his  labour  in  the 
dearest  market,  but  he  soon  found  that  there  was 
no  dearest  market  for  him.  Before  the  existence 
of  Trade  Unions  and  collective  bargaining,  the  work- 
man was  completely  at  the  mercy  of  the  employer, 
just  as  much  as  he  had  been  in  the  Middle  Ages. 
The  employer  could  and  did  exact  from  him  the 
whole  of  the  value  of  his  production  except  a  bare 
subsistence  wage  and,  since  the  supply  of  labour^ 
always  exceeded  the  demand,  the  workman  had  no 
choice  between  accepting  the  terms  offered  him  and 
starvation.  There  can  be  no  free  contract  on  the 
part  of  a  man  in  such  a  position  as  that.  And  such 
a  man  is  subject  to  the  maximum  of  constraint, 
although  the  constraint  is  economic  and  not  legal. 
He  cannot  be  said  to  have  liberty  in  any  true  sense 
of  the  term. 

Trade  Unions  and  collective  bargaining  have 
greatly  improved  the  position  of  the  workman, 
who  is  now  able  to  exact  from  the  employer  a 
larger  proportion  of  what  he  produces,  but  he  may 
still  be  unable  to  find  any  work  at  all.  In  that  case 
he  is  free  only  to  starve.  However  willing  he  may 
be  to  work,  and  however  competent,  he  is  unable  to 
work,  and  therefore  unable  to  live,  because  he  has 
no  access  to  the  means  of  production.  Can  a 
be  said  to  be  free  if  he  cannot  even  ga 

[at  is  to  say,  cannot  live  jatjilL^mtettfr-ttie 
permission  of  another  man  1  The  private  owner- 
ship oFtEe  means  of  production  gives  their  owners 


28    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 


the  power  to  hold  up  the  rest  of  the  community 
ransom.     They  say,  in  effect,  to  the  proletariat  : 
You  shall  not  work,  and  therefore  shall  not  live, 

me  make  a  profit  out  of 


labour,  and  if  I  have  nr>  npprl  nf  ynir_  yOU 
\  shall  not  wcA  and  therefore  shall  notJiv^  at 
Of  all  delusions,  surely  none  is  more  absurd 
the  delusion  that  the  capitalist  "  finds  " 
work  for  the  workman.  In  fact,  the  capitalist 
prevents  the  workman  from  working,  by  refusing 
the  use  of  the  means  of  production,  unless  it 
be  to  his  own  advantage  that  the  workman  shall 
work.  Economic  freedom  will  exist  for  all  only 
if  and  when  everybody  can  work  without  asking 
the  permission  of  anybody  else  ;  that  is  to  say, 
only  if  and  when  everybody  has  access  to  the 
means  of  production.  And  without  economic 
freedom  personal  liberty  is  impossible. 

The  proletariat  does  not  consist  only  of  manual 
workers.  There  is  a  "  black-coated  proletariat." 
The  bank  clerk,  the  journalist,  the  office  employee  — 
all,  no  matter  what  the  nature  of  their  work,  that 
must  find  somebody  to  employ  them  or  else  starve  — 
belong  to  the  proletariat.  All  non-manual  workers 
are  not  destitute  of  resources  other  than  their 
earnings  and,  in  so  far  as  they  have  "  independent 
means,"  they  belong  to  the  bourgeoisie,  to  which 
most  of  them  belong  by  birth  and  upbringing. 
For  that  reason  they  usually  have  a  bourgeois 
mentality  and  do  not  as  a  rule  realise  that  their 
interests  are  the  same  as  those  of  the  manual 
workers,  against  whom  they  are  inclined  to  side 


NECESSITY  OF  ECONOMIC  FREEDOM     29 

with  the  capitalists.  Snobbery  is  to  some  extent 
a  factor  in  their  attitude.  But,  whether  he  realises 
it  or  not,  a  man  with  a  salary  of  £2000  a  year 
belongs  to  the  proletariat  if  he  has  no  means  of 
livelihood  other  than  his  salary.  For  his  livelihood 
depends  on  his  employer,  who,  subject  to  any 
agreement,  can  throw  him  out  at  any  time.  A 
man  in  such  a  position  is  not  free,  and  that  is  the 
position  of  the  large  majority  of  mankind  at  this 
moment. 

Even  liberty  of  opinion  is  restricted  bv  existing 
Economic  cor^djtii^^g,  for  jjfrprfy  of  opinion  involves 
"a  free  press  and  the  press  is  not  free  in  a  capitalist. 
societyT     Once  again,  the  removal^of  legal  restric- 
seciifecT  ITberty^for  economic  restric- 


tions re^nain.  ]p,  f.hfr  days  when  it  cost  compara- 
tively little  tpj*un  a  paper,  the  press  was  relatively 
free.  NowaoavPthe  cost  of  a  daily  paper  is  so 
great  that  newspaper  property,  like  other  forms  of 
property  ri^TEecoming^  more  and  more  a  monopoly 
injke^liajids^^^  I  suppose  "  tKaJ 

a  capital  of  £500,000  is  the  minimum  on  which  a 
London  daily  paper  could  safely  be  started  to-day 
—very  likely  it  would  not  be  sufficient  —  and  how 
many  people  can  find  half  a  million  sterling  ? 
Moreover,  no  daily  paper  in  England  or  Germany 
or  America  can  be  made  to  pay,  or  even  to  cover 
expenses,  without  advertisements,  and  the  adver- 
tisers, who  are  capitalists,  naturally  show  a  dis- 
position to  boycott  papers  opposed  to  capitalism. 
In  France  and  Italy,  where  papers  are  much  smaller, 
they  can  be  run  without  a  loss  on  circulation  alone, 


30    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

if  the  circulation  be  sufficient,  or  they  could  before 
the  War,  but  only  on  condition  that  their  news 
service  be  reduced  to  a  minimum.  For  it  is  the 
news  service  that  costs  money.  The  consequence 
is  that,  with  very  rare  exceptions,  the  whole  of  the 
daily  press  in  every  country  is  in  the  hands  of  a 
few  rich  men.  A  daily  paper  can  be  run  in  the 
Socialist  or  Labour  interest  only  with  great  diffi- 
culty and  at  an  enormous  disadvantage. 

The  "  opinion  of  the  press  "  in  every  country_is, 
therefore,  the  opfaiion_ot  a  few'rich  men,  who  pay 
thepiper  and  naturally  call  the  tune.  No  worker 
^of~any  cla^sTias^so  little  Ji^6^^^8^^  joilHialist'. 
Probably  the  majority  of  journalists  sympathise 
rather  with  the  Left  in  politics  than  with  the 
Right,  but  they  have  to  express  their  employers' 
opinions,  not  their  own.  And,  what  is  even  worse, 
they  often  have  to  cook  the  news  in  their  employers' 
interest.  For  the  influence  of  a  newspaper  is 
exerted  more  through  its  news  than  by  its  leading 
articles,  which  a  large  proportion  of  its  readers 
probably  never  read.  The  most  effective  form 
of  propaganda,  as  all  the  belligerent  Governments 
discovered  during  the  War,  is  the  skilful  mani- 
pulation of  news.  The  number  of  papers  that  are 
really  honest  in  their  news  is  now  very  small  in 
any  country.  The  news  published  in  the  press, 
with  a  very  few  honourable  exceptions,  is  deliber- 
ately tendencious.  That  is  not  the  same  thing 
as  mere  bias.  Nobody  can  escape  from  bias,*  not 
even  a  newspaper  correspondent,  however  anxious 
he  may  be  to  tell  the  truth.  Nor  is  it  the  same 


NECESSITY  OF  ECONOMIC  FREEDOM    31 

thing  as  inaccuracy.  Perfect  accuracy  is  unattain- 
able, especially  in  the  conditions  of  rapidity 
required  by  a  daily  paper.  Sometimes  news  is 
simply  suppressed,  when  its  publication  might  be 
injurious  to  the  interests  of  the  proprietor  of  the 
paper,  its  advertisers,  or  the  capitalist  class  in 
general.  Sometimes  news  is  invented,  as  has  been 
the  case  of  so  much  of  the  news  about  Soviet 
Russia.  The  exposure  by  the  New  Republic  of 
the  Russian  news  published  in  the  New  York 
Times  would  have  damned  that  paper  for  ever, 
if  a  regard  for  truth  were  still  considered  to  be 
necessary  or  desirable  on  the  part  of  a  newspaper. 
More  often  news  is  deliberately  coloured.  It  is 
easy  to  give  an  entirely  false  impression  by  skilful 
omissions  and,  above  all,  by  mendacious  head- 
lines. The  latter  method  is  much  employed  in 
America,  where  newspaper  proprietors  seem  to 
think — no  doubt  with  reason — that  most  of  their 
readers  read  only  the  head-lines. 

Mr  Upton  Sinclair  has  shown  in  The  Brass  Check 
to  what  depths  of  mendacity  and  corruption  the 
American  press  has  fallen.  The  French  press  is 
quite  as  bad.  I  know  a  man  who  left  one  of  the 
Parisian  news  agencies  after  a  few  days,  because 
he  was  asked  to  forge  foreign  telegrams.  The 
English  press  is  not  yet  quite  as  bad,  but  it  is 
going  rapidly  in  the  same  direction.  The  evil  is 
increased  by  the  tendency  towards  newspaper 
trusts  and  combines.  In  America,  in  more  than 
one  case,  fifty  or  sixty  newspapers  are  owned  by 
one  man,  and  we  see  in  England  an  attempt  being 


/ 
\J 


32    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

made  to  form  a  newspaper  trust  under  individual 
control  —  an  attempt  characterised  by  no  excessive 
scruple  about  the  methods  employed.  In  these 
conditions  it  is  a  delusion  to  talk  of  the  liberty  of 
the  press.  Freedom  of  the  press,  like  other  forms 
of  freedom,  can  be  secured  only  by  destroying 
capitalist  monopoly  and  giving  all  equal  access 
to  the  means  of  production. 

During  the  last  seventy  years  one  attempt  after 

Tnfl,Hft  to  finf|  rpmprlipg  fnr 


arising  out  of  the  system  of  :  cj,£itajjist  L_monopply. 
Each  successive  remedy  has  turned  out  to  be  at 

_^^-  ----  __  r—  -  _  .  _  __  ;  ------  =*• 

best  a  palliative—  -at  worst  an  aggravation  of  the 
disease.  State  interference  in  industry  was  opposed 
by  the  Manchester  Liberals  on  the  ground  that  it 
was  interference  with  personal  liberty.  It  seems 
now  almost  incredible  that  men  like  Cobden  could 
have  thought  that  the  limitation  of  the  hours  of 
labour  .of  women  and  children  in  factories  was  a 
restriction  of  the  liberty  of  the  women  and  children. 
The  only  liberty  that  it  restricted  was  that  of  the 
employers  to  make  the  women  and  children  work 
as  long  as  they  chose.  For  no  factory  could  be 
run  at  all  if  the  workers  were  allowed  to  come  and 
go  as  they  pleased  —  to  work  two  hours  one  day 
and  ten  the  next.  In  any  form  of  society  there 
will  have  to  be  regulations  in  collective  production. 
The  alternatives  in  this  particular  case  were  regula- 
tion by  the  employers  and  regulation  by  law.  In 
fact,  the  limitation  of  the  hours  of  labour  gave  the 
women  and  children  a  liberty  that  the  employers 
had  denied  them. 


NECESSITY  OF  ECONOMIC  FREEDOM     33 

Nevertheless,  it  is  true  enough  that  State  inter- 
ference in  industry  is  a  bad  thing,  but  it  is  unavoid- 
able in  capitalist  conditions.  The  consequences 
of  leaving  capitalist  conditions  to  produce  their  - 
natural  results  unchecked  were  so  appalling  that 
the  public  conscience  would  no  longer  tolerate 
them.  So  the  State  has  had  to  interfere  more  and 
more  to  modify  those  consequences.  Law  after 
law  has  been  passed-in-th^  hope  of  mitigating 
evils  Jjiat  are  mherent^m^the  system  of  capitalist 
monagoly.  Each  law  has  led  to  a  new  evil  and 
made  necessary  yet  another  law  to  correct  it. 
The  enormous  number  of  laws  with  which  all 
civilised  countries  are  now  afflicted  is  the  sign  of 
a  diseased  society.  A  .healthy  so^ty  n*Wlg  ™AJJt, 
has  few  laws.  We  are  in  a  vicious  circle  and  there 
is  only  one  escape  from  it.  We  must  cease  to 


tinker  with  the  symptoms  of  the  disease  and  ,yy 

with  its  cause. 

Socialism  —  the  socialisation  or  collective  owner- 
ship of  the  means  of  production  —  is  now  the 
only  alternative  to  private  monopoly.  That  has 
not  always  been  the  case,  and  would  not  be  the 
case  in  all  conceivable  economic  conditions,  but  it 
is  the  case  in  existing  conditions.  Modern  Socialism 
is  not,  then,  based  on  any  metaphysical  conception 
of  a  community  with  an  entity  and  a  life  of  its  own 
apart  from  those  of  the  individuals  that  compose  it, 
or  on  any  supposed  superiority  of  the  community 
over  the  individual.  It  is  not  based  on  any  belief 
in  the  ethical  advantages  of  co-operation  as  opposed 
to  competition,  or  on  the  fatherhood  of  God,  or  on 


34    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

the  brotherhood  of  man,  or  on  any  religious  or 
moral  or  philosophical  doctrine.  It  is  simply  an 
induction  from  facts.  In  the  words  of  Karl  Marx 
and  Frederick  Engels :  "  The  theoretical  con- 
clusions of  Communism  are  in  no  way  based  on 
ideas  or^  principles  that  have  been  invented  or 
discovered  by  this  or  that  would-be  universal 
reformer.  They  merely  express,  in  general  terms, 
actual  relations  springing  from  an  existing  class- 
struggle,  from  an  historical  movement  going  on 
under  our  very  eyes." 

It  is  not,  however,  enough  to  socialise  the  means 
of  production  in  each  country,  for  natural  resources 
are  not  equally  distributed.  The  monopolisation 
of  the  natural  resources  of  any  particular  part  of  the 
globe  by  any  race  or  nation  is  as  bad  as  any  other 
monopoly.  Equal  access  to  the  means  of  produc- 
tion therefore  involves  complete  freedom  of  com- 
munications and  exchange.  On  the  one  hand  every 
individual  should  be  free  to  move  about  the  world  as 
he  pleases  and  to  settle  anywhere  without  let  or 
hindrance,  provided  he  conforms  to  the  local  laws 
and  regulations.  On  the  other  hand  the  inter- 
national exchange  of  commodities  should  not  be 
restricted  by  import  or  export  duties,  embargoes  on 
imports  or  exports,  or  any  other  means.  The 
suppression  of  political  and  economic  frontiers — 
which  does  not  mean  that  of  territorial  boundaries — 
is  essential  to  economic  freedom. 


CHAPTER   III. 

DEMOCRATISM. 

ONE  of  the  characteristics  of  the  moment  is  the 
reaction  against  the  parliamentary  form  of  govern- 
ment and  even  against  democracy  as  such.  In 
France  anti-parliamentarism  has  been  prevalent 
for  more  than  twenty  years — the  reactionary 
anti-parliamentarism  of  the  Royalists  and  the 
revolutionary  anti-parliamentarism  of  the  Syndi- 
calists. In  England  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  a 
large  proportion  of  the  working  class  no  longer 
believes  in  the  possibility  of  realising  its  hopes  by 
parliamentary  action.  In  every  country  the  same 
tendency  exists  more  or  less.  Anti-parliamentarism 
is  not  necessarily  an ti -democratic — our  existing 
parliamentary  institutions  are  not  the  only  con- 
ceivable form  of  democracy — but  there  is  now  a 
strong  reaction  against  democracy  in  itself.  It  is 
in  part  the  consequence  of  the  Russian  revolution, 
which  has  encouraged  the  belief  that  an  energetic 
minority  can  impose  its  will  by  force  on  the  majority 
— as  no  doubt  it  can  in  some  countries  and  in  certain 
circumstances.  The  attractive  prospect  of  a  short 
cut  to  Socialism  has  led  many  of  the  adherents 
of  the  Third  International  to  become,  consciously 
or  unconsciously,  definitely  anti -democratic.  Mr 

35 


36    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

Bernard  Shaw  seems  to  be  among  those  that 
have  given  up  democracy  in  despair.  Mr  Hilaire 
Belloc,  who  is  not  a  Socialist,  is  another,  but  he, 
a  true  Frenchman,  carries  the  anti-democratic 
reaction  to  its  logical  conclusion  and  advocates 
a  strong  monarchy,  hereditary  or  elective.  In 
fact,  Mr  Belloc  has  arrived  at  Bonapartism, 
which  is  the  political  counterpart  of  his  religious 
creed. 

The  reaction  against  democracy,  if  it  continues 
and  grows,  can  lead  only  to  Bonapartism,  or  some- 
thing like  it.  It  is  perfectly  true  that  all  the  great 
movements  in  history  have  been  the  work  of 
minorities,  but  Mr  Hyndman  is  right  in  saying 
that  Socialism  can  be  permanently  achieved  only 
when  the  majority  is  ready  to  accept  it,  although, 
in  my  opinion,  he  goes  too  far  in  saying  that  the 
majority  must  also  understand  it.  An  attempt 
to  impose  Socialism  by  force  on  the  majority 
will  fail,  not  only  because  force  has  no  creative 
power,  but  also  because  the  ruling  minority  will 
be  demoralised  by  the  exercise  of  authority.  "  No 
man  is  good  enough  to  be  another  man's  master  " 
—not  even  a  Communist  bureaucrat.  The  tyranny 
of  a  minority,  or  even  the  despotic  rule  of  a  single 
individual,  would  be  excellent,  if  there  were  any 
means  of  selecting  the  minority  or  the  individual 
capable  of  exercising  authority  without  being 
demoralised  thereby.  There  are  no  such  means, 
because  there  are  no  such  human  beirigs.  Oligarchy 
and  despotism  are  as  Utopian  as  anarchism  ;  all 
alike  ignore  fundamental  tendencies  of  human 


DEMOCRATISM  37 

nature.  The  most  practical  and  workable  system 
is  to  give  to  the  majority  the  decision  of  such  few 
questions  as  cannot  be  left  to  each  individual. 
It  is  not  perfect,  but  it  is  the  least  imperfect. 
Industry  will  be  more  successful  in  a  Socialist 
society  if  the  manager  of  a  factory  is  elected  by  the 
workers  than  if  he  is  appointed  by  a  Government. 
And  a  country  in  which  the  workers  have  not 
reached  a  sufficiently  high  level  of  civilisation  to 
make  that  possible  is  not  fit  for  Socialism. 

Nevertheless,  it  is  true  that  parliamentarism  is 
a  failure.  In  my  opinion  it  cannot  last ;  the  signs 
of  decadence  are  evident.  And  its  failure  is  not 
surprising,  for  its  vices  are  inherent  in  the  concep- 
tion on  which  it  is  based — the  conception  to  which 
the  French  revolutionary  Syndicalists  have  given 
the  name  of  democratism.  We  owe  the  theory  of 
democratism  to  the  French  and  American  Revolu- 
tions. For  the  individual  sovereign  they  substituted 
the  Sovereign  People,  not  realising  that  the  new 
idol  would  be  as  dangerous  to  liberty  as  the  old, 
for  all  sovereignty'  is  incompatible  with  personal 
liberty.  "  Government  of  the  people  for  the  people 
by  the  people  "  :  that  is  the  formula  of  demo- 
cratism. But  the  people  cannot  govern  directly. 
The  inhabitants  of  a  village  might  manage  their 
local  affairs  by  means  of  a  popular  assembly,  but 
not  the  millions  of  inhabitants  of  England  or  the 
United  States  of  America,  or  even  of  London  or 
New  York.  So  they  have  to  choose  representatives 
to  manage  their  affairs  for  them.  And  to  those 
representatives  is  transferred  the  sovereignty  of 


38    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

the  people.  So  the  Sovereign  People  becomes  in 
practice  the  Sovereign  Parliament — omnipotent 
and  endowed  with  universal  competence,  with  the 
power  to  legislate  on  any  and  every  question. 
And  above  the  Sovereign  Parliament  is  the  effec- 
tive organ  of  the  Sovereign  State — the  Executive 
Government,  subject  in  England  and  France  (but 
not  in  the  United  States)  to  the  control  of  Parlia- 
ment in  the  sense  that  the  latter  can  dismiss  it, 
but  in  fact  omnipotent  in  administration  and 
nearly  so  in  foreign  policy.  The  French  Constitu- 
tion explicitly,  and  the  British  Constitution  tradi- 
tionally, give  the  Executive  the  power  to  bind  the 
Sovereign  People,  without  their  knowledge  or  that  of 
their  representatives,  to  treaties  by  which  they  are 
bartered  like  cattle. 

The  political  freedom  of  the  democratists  thus 
resolves  itself  in  practice  into  the  freedom  to  choose 
once  every  few  years  between  the  least  of  two  or 
three  evils  in  the  form  of  candidates  presented  by 
various  political  caucuses.  In  the  interval  the 
Sovereign  People  has  no  sort  of  control  over  its 
representatives,  and  in  England  its  representatives 
have  less  and  less  control  over  the  Executive. 
The  functions  of  the  House  of  Commons  are  reduced 
to  little  more  than  those  of  talking  and  of  register- 
ing the  decrees  of  the  Government.  The  private 
member  is  deprived  of  all  initiative  and  the  right 
of  putting  questions  to  Ministers  is  almost  the  only 
right  left  to  him.  The  House  of  Commons  no  longer 
even  dares  to  dismiss  a  Government.  The  French 
Chamber  of  Deputies  is  more  independent,  although 


DEMOCRATISM  39 

the  French  system  is  far  from  being  really  demo- 
cratic. In  reality  the  sovereignty  of  the  Sovereign 
People  has  become  little  more  than  the  right  to 
decide  every  few  years  with  what  sauce  it  shall  be 
eaten  during  the  ensuing  period.  And  there  is  so 
little  difference  between  the  sauces. 

Of  course  it  would  be  possible  to  devise  a  more 
democratic  parliamentary  system  than  the  French 
or  British.  The  Swiss  system,  for  example,  is 
more  democratic — it  provides  for  popular  initia- 
tive and  referendum,  the  Executive  is  directly 
elected  by  the  legislative  body,  and  Ministers 
are  individually,  not  collectively,  responsible  to 
Parliament.  But  democracy  is  impossible  except 
in  small  areas  where  the  elector  can  always  be  in 
close  touch  with  his  representatives,  and  no  real 
control  of  representatives  is  possible  without  the 
right  of  recall,  which  can  be  effectively  exercised 
only  in  small  areas.  Democracy,  therefore,  involves 
decentralisation.  Direct  election  should  be  re- 
stricted to  small  areas — the  commune  or  the  ward 
—and  the  representatives  so  elected  should  send 
delegates  to  the  provincial  or  national  bodies. 

The  fundamental  vice  of  democratism  is, 
however,  the  notion  that  it  is  possible  for  one  man 
to  represent  another.  To  the  Guild  Socialists 
belongs  the  credit  of  having  pointed  out  that 
fallacy  and  having  proposed  a  remedy.  As  Mr 
Cole  says  :  "a  human  being  as  an  individual  is 
fundamentally  incapable  of  being  represented." 
He  can  be  represented  only  "  in  relation  to  some 
particular  purpose  or  group  of  purposes."  The 


40    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

only  satisfactory  form  of  representation  is,  there- 
fore, "  functional  representation  "  :  that  is  to  say, 
there  must  be  different  representatives  for  different 
purposes.  We  must  get  rid  of  "  the  omni-com- 
petent  State  with  its  omni-competent  Parliament," 
and  divide  such  of  its  functions  as  it  is  desirable 
to  retain — probably  not  the  majority — among 
several  bodies  representing  the  interests  of  different 
groups  of  citizens  or  the  different  interests  of  all 
the  citizens.  It  is  the  application  to  administra- 
tion of  the  principle  of  the  division  of  labour.* 

But,  even  if  political  democracy  were  thus  made 
really  democratic,  as  it  is  nowhere  at  present,  it 
would  still  be  a  failure.  For  political  liberty  and 
political  equality  are  illusions  without  economic 
freedom  and  economic  equality.  Rich  and  poor 
may  have  equal  political  rights  by  law,  but  they  can 
never  have  equal  power.  Economic  power  pre- 
cedes political  power  and  is  more  real  and  effective. 
So  long  as  a  minority  monopolise  the  means  of 
production,  they  will  be  the  real  rulers,  however 
democratic  the  political  system  may  be.  Marx  and 
Engels  were  right  in  saying,  more  than  seventy 
years  ago  :  "  Political  power  properly  so  called  is 
merely  the  organised  power  of  one  class  for  oppress- 
ing another."  And  political  democracy  is  merely 
a  device  for  concealing  from  the  oppressed  class  the 
fact  that  it  is  oppressed.  So  long  as  all  the  re- 
sources of  a  country  are  owned  by  a  certain  number 
of  individuals,  the  representatives  of  the  people 

*  See  Guild  Socialism  Restated,  p.  31  ff.     London :   Leonard 
Parsons  Ltd.,  1920. 


DEMOCRATISM  41 

will  be  under  the  effective  control  of  those  indi- 
viduals. As  Anatole  France  says  :  "  The  Penguin 
democracy  did  not  govern  itself  ;  it  was  subject 
to  a  financial  oligarchy  which  manufactured  opinion 
by  means  of  the  press  and  held  in 'its  hand  the 
Deputies,  the  Ministers  and  the  President.  This 
oligarchy  was  the  sovereign  administrator  of  the 
finances  of  the  Republic  and  directed  the  foreign 
policy  of  the  country."  The  character  of  the  peace 
made  by  the  victorious  allied  Governments  shows 
how  true  is  this  description  of  political  democracy. 
The  remedy,  then,  is  not  a  return  to  monarchy 
or  oligarchy,  but  the  destruction  of  that  instru- 
ment of  oppression,  the  State.  The  alternative  to 
political  democracy  is  industrial  democracy.  We 
must  get  rid  of  political  power  properly  so  called 
—of  the  government  of  men — and  substitute  for 
it  the  administration  of  things.  In  that  adminis- 
tration the  final  decision  will  rest  with  the  majority 
because  it  must — failing  the  appearance  on  this 
earth  of  a  superman  or  supermen  free  from  all 
human  weaknesses.  But  that  does  not  imply  the 
sovereignty  of  the  people,  which  means  in  practice 
the  sovereignty  of  half  the  people  plus  one.  The 
tyranny  of  a  majority  is  as  bad  as  that  of  a 
minority  or  an  individual.  It  is  the  whole  con- 
ception of  sovereignty  or  authority  that  is  wrong. 
The  powers  of  the  various  functional  representa- 
tives would  be  limited  to  their  respective  functions, 
and  there  would  be  no  body  of  men  with  sovereign 
and  universal  powers.  The  individual  would  be 
subject  to  no  constraint  other  than  that  necessary 


42    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

to  prevent  him  from  interfering  with  the  liberty 
and  rights  of  others,  if  he  attempted  to  do  so.  Coer- 
cion of  minorities  or  individuals  would  be  resorted 
to  only  in  the  last  resource  when  all  means  of 
persuasion  had  failed.  Freedom  of  association 
would  greatly  reduce  the  occasions  of  coercion,  for 
there  would  be  no  jealousy  of  "  a  State  within  the 
State,"  and  the  /existence  of  autonomous  groups 
would  become  possible.  With  the  disappearance 
of  the  Sovereign  State,  a  country  would  become, 
like  a  town,  or  a  county,  or  a  province,  an  adminis- 
trative area  in  the  federal  organisation,  and  every- 
body would  be  a  citizen  of  the  world,  that  is,  jof 
the  place  where  he  happened  to  live.  Only  in 
such  conditions  will  personal  liberty  be  really 
possible.  In  the  words  of  Engels  :  "  Society, 
which  will  reorganise  production  on  the  basis  of  a 
free  association  of  producers  with  equal  rights,  will 
relegate  the  whole  machine  of  the  State  to  its 
proper  place — the  museum  of  antiquities,  along 
with  the  spinning-wheel  and  the  bronze  hatchet." 

The  cult  of  the  omnipotent  State,  which  has  been 
a  consequence  of  democratism,  has  been  disastrous 
to  personal  liberty.  The  personification  or  mythic- 
isation  of  the  State  or  the  "  Patrie  "  is  a  modern 
form  of  idolatry — it  dates  in  France  from  the 
Revolution — and  mystical  patriotism  is  a  modern 
religion.  It  is  not  the  natural  affection  of  a 
man  for  his  native  city — like  the  love  of  Pericles 
for  Athens — but  the  worship  of  a  mythicised 
"  England  "  or  "  France  "  or  "  Germany,"  which  is 
neither  the  territory  nor  the  people,  but  a  personi- 


DEMOCRATISM  43 

fied  abstraction.  A  country  is  even  endowed  with  a 
"  moral  personality."  The  most  amusing  example 
that  I  know  of  this  aberration  occurs  in  M.  Paul 
Deschanel's  Gambetta,  where  M.  Deschanel  solemnly 
declares  it  to  be  the  duty  of  a  nation  "  to  shed  the 
last  drop  of  her  blood  for  her  children."  It  would 
be  interesting  to  hear  from  M.  Deschanel  what  blood 
a  nation  has  to  shed  except  that  of  "  her  children  " 
themselves,  and  what  would  be  left  of  the  nation 
or  "  her  children  "  when  the  last  drop  of  that 
had  gone.  Unhappily,  the  consequences  of  this 
superstition  are  not  merely  rhetorical.  It  has  led 
to  the  sacrifice  of  the  "  children  "  in  order  that 
they  might  not  be  deprived  of  a  mother. 

The  religion  of  patriotism  is  one  of  the  greatest 
obstacles  to  Socialism,  for  its  hold  on  the  prole- 
tariats of  the  different  countries  has  enabled  them 
to  be  persuaded  that  it  was  their  duty  to  fight  one 
another  in  the  interest  of  their  respective  masters. 
If  we  do  not  want  another  generation  of  young  men 
to  pass  through  the  fire  to  the  Moloch  of  the  State, 
we  must  overthrow  the  idol,  break  down  his  altars, 
and  disperse  his  priests.  And  let  us  take  care  to 
put  no  other  idol  in  his  place.  Already  there  are 
disquieting  symptoms  of  a  tendency  to  personify 
and  mythicise  the  proletariat,  to  which  some  people 
seem  disposed  to  sacrifice  the  proletarians. 

Democratism  also  menaces  personal  liberty  by 
its  claim  that  the  majority  is  infallible  and  has 
the  right  to  impose  its  tastes  and  opinions  on 
the  minority.  Has  not  the  "  people,"  we  are  asked, 
the  right  to  say  whether  it  will  have  alcoholic 


44    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

drinks  ?  What  is  really  meant  is  :  Has  not  the 
majority  the  right  to  prevent  the  minority  from 
having  them  ?  The  only  reasonable  solution  is 
to  allow  those  that  want  them  to  have  them  and 
those  that  do  not  to  go  without.  If  people  get 
drunk  and  make  themselves  a  nuisance  to  others, 
they  should  be  dealt  with.  It  is  in  the  United 
States  of  America  that  majority  tyranny  has  been 
carried  furthest.  The  apostles  of  "  hundred  per 
cent.  Americanism  "  are  trying  to  impose  a  single 
standard  of  conduct  and  opinion — by  force,  if 
necessary.  The  ideal  of  "  hundred  per  cent. 
Americans  "  is  that  all  should  dress  alike,  look 
alike,  think  alike,  speak  alike  and  act  alike.  The 
enemies  of  liberty  have  been  encouraged  by  their 
success  in  the  matter  of  Prohibition  to  embark 
on  a  campaign  for  a  whole  series  of  repressive 
measures  intended  to  enforce  their  own  conceptions 
of  religion  and  morality  on  everybody.  The  chief 
organisers  of  the  campaign  are,  I  am  informed, 
the  Methodist  Episcopal  and  Baptist  Churches, 
the  Women's  Christian  Temperance  Union  and  the 
Young  Women's  Christian  Association.  They  seem 
to  be  liberally  supplied  with  funds — enormous  sums 
were  spent  on  the  Prohibition  campaign. 

One  of  the  objectives  is  the  suppression  of 
tobacco.  Cigarette  smoking  is  already  illegal  in 
the  State  of  Kansas.  In  some  States  the  works 
of  authors  considered  by  the  Puritans  to  be  immoral 
are  banned  ;  in  others  it  is  a  penal  offence  to  wear 
what  is  called  in  America  a  "  one-piece  .bathing 
suit."  The  attempt  is  being  made  to  repress 


DEMOCRATISM  45 

prostitution  by  persecuting  prostitutes  and  their 
customers,  who  are  alike  liable  to  imprisonment  in 
certain  States.  Since  it  is  not  even  necessary  that 
there  should  be  a  pecuniary  consideration  to 
constitute  the  offence,  the  law  could  be,  and  no 
doubt  will  be,  used  to  penalise  any  extra-matri- 
monial sexual  relations.  The  opportunities  for 
blackmail  that  it  affords  are  so  obvious  that  they 
need  not  be  insisted  on.  The  latest  move  is  a 
proposal  to  close  on  Sundays  all  places  of  amuse- 
ment, public  galleries,  libraries  and  every  other 
public  institution,  except,  of  course,  the  churches  ; 
to  suppress  all  Sunday  trains,  trams  and  other 
public  conveyances,  except  immediately  before 
and  after  the  hours  of  church  services  ;  to  forbid 
Sunday  newspapers  ;  to  make  all  games  and  sports 
on  Sundays  illegal  ;  and  to  prevent  motoring, 
as  far  as  possible,  by  regulating  the  sale  of  petrol. 
One  wonders  why  it  is  not  proposed  to  force  every- 
body by  law  to  attend  church  at  least  once  a  week  : 
no  doubt  that  will  come  if  the  Lord's  Day  Alliance 
succeeds  in  its  present  modest  programme.  It 
hardly  seems  possible  that  it  can,  but  it  appears 
that  the  Alliance  has  plenty  of  money  behind  it, 
and  the  success  of  the  Prohibition  campaign  shows 
what  money  can  do  in  American  politics. 

Prohibition  and  Sabbatarianism  are,  however, 
trifles  in  comparison  with  the  outrages  on  private 
liberty  committed  in  the  United  States  both  by  the 
authorities  and  by  gangs  of  middle-class  ruffians 
such  as  the  members  of  the  "  American  Legior." 
And,  although  the  dogma  of  the  infallibility  of  the 


46    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

herd  is  not  yet  enforced  in  the  European  "  demo- 
cracies "  so  thoroughly  as  in  the  "  sweet  land  of 
liberty,"  encroachments  on  personal  liberty  are 
becoming  more  and  more  serious  in  every  European 
country.  We  have  had  the  system  of  lettres  de 
cachet  introduced  into  England  for  the  first  time  in 
our  history  by  a  Liberal  Government  during  the 
War,  and  we  have  now  a  political  police,  using  all  the 
habitual  methods  of  such  a  police,  including  forgery 
and  the  agent  provocateur.  Men  are  sent  to  prison 
in  England  merely  for  expressing  Communist 
opinions  or  selling  Communist  publications.  The 
Emergency  Powers  Act  confers  on  the  Government 
powers  that  the  Stewarts  would  have  envied  and 
tha*t,  in  the  opinion  of  such  men  as  Charles  James 
Fox,  would  justify  revolt.  The  public  sense  of 
liberty  has  been  blunted  by  the  habit  acquired 
during  the  War  and  by  the  monstrous  doctrine  that 
it  is  a  duty  to  submit  to  any  act  of  tyranny  sanc- 
tioned by  a  "  democratically  elected  "  House  of 
Commons.  Even  if  our  political  system  were  demo- 
cratic, encroachments  on  personal  liberty  would  be 
no  more  tolerable.  Indeed,  if  one  had  to  make  the 
choice  of  evils,  perhaps  the  tyranny  of  an  autocracy 
or  an  oligarchy  would  be  less  intolerable  than  the 
tyranny  of  the  herd. 


CHAPTER   IV. 

SPURIOUS  SOCIALISMS. 

DEMOCRATISM  has  produced  a  spurious  form  of 
Socialism,  variously  known  as  State  Socialism, 
Reformism,  and,  in  France,  as  ttatisme,  the  most 
accurate  title  for  which  would  perhaps  be  State 
Capitalism.  According  to  this  theory  the  various 
industries  would  be  nationalised  one  after  the  other 
by  being  taken  over  by  the  political  State  and 
converted  into  State  monopolies.  Reformism,  if 
I  am  not  mistaken,  originated  in  England  and  it 
has  gained  a  greater  hold  in  this  country  than 
in  any  other,  thanks  in  particular  to  the  Fabian 
Society.  But  some  of  its  leading  supporters  have 
considerably  modified  the  theory  or  entirely  aban- 
doned it.  In  France  a  Reformist  programme  was 
first  put  forward  in  1896  by  M.  Millerand,  now 
President  of  the  Republic,  in  a  speech  delivered 
at  a  congress  of  the  "  Possibilist "  Socialist  party, 
to  which  he  then  belonged,  at  Saint  Mande,  a 
suburb  of  Paris.  Hence  it  became  known  as  the 
Saint-Mande  programme.  The  term  "  Reformist  " 
is  now  very  loosely  employed,  especially  by  the 
Russian  Communists  and  their  supporters  in 
other  countries,  who  apply  it  indiscriminately 
to  everybody  outside  the  Third  International. 

47 


48    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

Indeed,  it  has  become  with  them  a  mere  term  of 
abuse.  More  generally  it  is  used  of  Socialists  that 
believe  it  possible  to  bring  about  Socialism  by 
peaceful  means.  That  is  an  accurate  enough  use 
of  the  term,  if  by  peaceful  are  meant  constitu- 
tional means,  for  State  Socialism  is  the  only  form 
of  Socialism  that  could  be  brought  about  by  con- 
stitutional means.  The  successive  conversion  of 
industries  into  State  or  municipal  monopolies 
involves  no  fundamental  change  in  the  structure 
of  society  and  could  be  effected  by  Act  of  Parlia- 
ment. 

It  is  the  mistaken  identification  of  Reformism 
or  blatisme  with  Socialism,  in  the  classical  sense  of 
the  term,  that  has  been  one  of  the  chief  causes  of 
the  belief  that  Socialism  is  incompatible  with 
personal  liberty.  Evidently  a  system  of  State 
monopoly  would  be  incompatible  with  personal 
liberty.  The  very  condition  of  its  existence 
would,  as  M.  Emile  Vandervelde  has  said,  "  be  a 
formidable  concentration  of  power  in  the  hands  of 
the  Government."  It  would,  indeed,  aggravate 
all  the  evils  of  the  omnipotent  and  universally 
competent  State,  which  would  have  the  manage- 
ment and  control  of  industry  in  addition  to  all  its 
present  powers.  Political  power,  far  from  being 
abolished,  would  be  enormously  strengthened  by 
the  transference  to  its  organ,  the  State,  of  all 
economic  power.  The  result  could  hardly  be 
anything  but  an  oppressive  tyranny.  Instead  of 
several  individual  capitalist  employers,  there  would 
be  one  collective  employer — the  State.  The  wage- 


SPURIOUS  SOCIALISMS  49 

slaves  of  the  capitalists  would  become  the  wage- 
slaves  of  a  bureaucracy.  And  the  new  master 
would  be  armed  with  more  formidable  weapons 
than  the  old  ones.  Strikes  would  become  revolts 
against  the  State  and  would  be  repressed  as  such. 
Although  the  mines  in  England  in  1920  were  only 
"  controlled  "  by  the  State,  the  Government  used 
public  money  for  propaganda  against  the  miners' 
strike  and  employed  all  the  resources  of  the  State 
to  defeat  it.  If  the  State  becomes  an  employer,  it 
will  defend  its  interests  like  any  other  employer. 

State  monopoly,  moreover,  would  mean  the 
stifling  of  individual  enterprise  and  initiative. 
We  have  examples  of  State  monopolies  in  industry  ; 
they  are  not  encouraging.  The  owner  of  a  mono- 
poly, having  the  consumers  at  his  mercy,  need 
take  no  trouble  to  find  new  methods  or  new 
styles,  or  to  keep  up  the  quality  of  the  products. 
Monopoly  could  result  only  in  stagnation  and 
conservatism  and  that  has,  in  fact,  been  the 
result  of  it  in  every  country  where  it  has  been  tried. 
There  are,  of  course,  certain  natural  monopolies 
and  certain  industries — railways,  for  example — 
that  are  of  the  nature  of  public  services,  but  even 
they  should  not  be  under  the  control  of  the  political 
State  or  managed  by  a  Minister  and  a  Government 
department.  There  are  few  countries  where  even 
the  postal  service  is  decently  managed  ;  I  know  of 
no  State  telegraph  system  that  gives  so  many 
facilities  as  the  Atlantic  cable  companies,  and  the 
State  telephones  in  nearly  every  country  are  a 
byword.  No  political  body  should  be  allowed  to 

D 


50    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

have  anything  to  do  with  industry — with  pro- 
duction, distribution  or  exchange.  So  long  as  the 
political  State  lasts,  its  functions  should  be  strictly 
limited  to  political  matters.  There  should  be  a 
complete  separation  between  the  organ  of  authority 
and  the  organs  of  management — between  the 
government  of  men  and  the  administration  of 
things — until  Socialism  has  got  rid  of  the  govern- 
ment of  men  and  only  the  administration  of  things 
remains.  Reformism  or  etatisme  not  merely  repro- 
duces all  the  vices  of  democratism,  but  intensi- 
fies them.  It  would  pile  on  to  the  already  over- 
loaded Parliament  and  municipal  authorities  the 
additional  task  of  managing  the  industry  of  the 
country  or  controlling  its  management.  The 
task  would  be  impossible  and  the  whole  control 
would  pass  into  the  hands  of  an  omnipotent 
bureaucracy.  It  would  be  worse  than  the  capitalist 
system. 

But  Reformism  is  not  Socialism,  as  it  was  under- 
stood by  Marx  and  Engels  and  has  been  understood 
by  all  Socialist  writers  for  the  last  seventy  years. 
As  Jules  Guesde  has  said  :  "  The  nationalisation 
of  private  industries  by  the  bourgeois  State  is  not 
Socialism  and  has  nothing  to  do  with  Socialism." 
M.  Emile  Vandervelde  is  now  a  Minister  of  the 
King  of  the  Belgians  and  has  adopted  what  is  in 
fact  a  Reformist  policy,  but  he  is  of  the  same 
opinion  as  Jules  Guesde.  Dr  Inge,  Dean  of  St 
Paul's,  said  in  a  lecture  in  February  1914  that 
"  Socialism  may  be  conceived  as  an  omnipotent 
bureaucracy  directed  by  a  small  number  of  capable 


SPURIOUS  SOCIALISMS  51 

men  of  the  type  of  Napoleon  or  Pierpont  Morgan." 
To  this  M.  Vandervelde  replied  : — 

"  Is  it  necessary  to  repeat  that,  if  such  were 
Socialism,  it  would  have  no  more  energetic 
opponents  than   Socialists  ?     Such   a   system 
of  generalised    etatisme  would   maintain    the 
wage  system,  maintain  the  authority  of  the 
employer,  maintain  the  relations  of  subordina- 
tion existing  between  the  ruling  class  and  the 
class  of  the  workers.     Socialism,  on  the  con- 
trary, implies  a  radical  and  essential  change 
in   those   relations.     It   is  not  a  question  of 
replacing  private  capitalism  by  State  capital- 
ism, but  of  replacing  both  private  capitalism 
and  State  capitalism  by  the  co-operation  of  the 
workers,  masters  of  the  means  of  production  and 
exchange.     And  such  a  transformation,  which 
suppresses  the  distinction  between  capitalists 
and  workers,  is  nothing  less  than  a  revolution*!!^ 
And,  summing  up  the  difference  between  Social- 
ism and  Reformism,  or  etatisme,  M.  Vandervelde 
says  :     "  fitatisme    is    the    organisation    of    social 
labour  by  the  State — the  Government.     Socialism 
is  the  organisation  of  social  labour  by  the  workers 
themselves,  grouped  in  recognised  associations." 

Jules  Guesde  and  M.  Vandervelde  are  in  com- 
plete agreement  on  this  point  with  Karl  Marx._a»4- 
Frederick  Engels.  I  have  already  quoted  the 
passage  in  which  Engels  declared  that  the  State 
would  be  relegated  to  the  museum  of  antiquities. 

*  Le  Socialisme  contre  VEtat,  p.  167.  Paris :  Berger-Levrault, 
1918. 


52    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

Bakunin  considered  Marxist  Socialism  to  be  too 
centralising  and  I  am  disposed  to  agree  with  him. 
For  reasons  that  will  be  mentioned  presently,  it 
is  possible  that  the  Marxist  system,  strictly  applied, 
would  involve  something  too  much  like  a  bureau- 
cratic State,  but  never  would  Marx  or  Engels 
have  admitted  that  State  monopoly  was  Socialism. 
They  never  ceased  to  declare  that  Socialism  must 
destroy  the  State  and  replace  it  by  "  the  free 
federation  of  all  men."  So  much  was  this  the  case 
that  they  opposed  the  nationalisation  of  the  rail- 
ways or  the  mines  by  the  bourgeois  State  and  have 
been  followed  in  that  regard  by  the  strict  Marxists. 
Kautsky  opposed  the  proposal  to  nationalise  the 
mines  in  Prussia.  Jules  Guesde  and  the  French 
Marxists  voted  against  the  State  purchase  of  the 
Western  Railway  of  France  in  1910.  Guesde,  in  his 
pamphlet,  "  Les  Services  publics  et  le  Socialisme," 
declares  that  "  public  services  can  only  be  dangerous 
to  the  party  of  labour  and  its  aims  "  in  a  bourgeois 
State  :  "  the  revolution  first,  that  is  to  say,  the  poli- 
tical and  economic  expropriation  of  the  Capitalist 
class ;  public  services  afterwards,  because,  after 
the  fusion  of  classes  into  a  single  class,  services 
really  public  will  be  possible."  And  in  his  contro- 
versy with  the  French  Reformists,  Guesde  main- 
tained that  nationalisation,  "  far  from  simplifying 
expropriation  by  the  proletariat,  by  creating  a 
certain  amount  of  public  property,  is  only  a  danger 
to  the  workers,  because  it  strengthens  the  enemy,the 
bourgeoisie,  and  weakens  the  working  class,  whose 
movements  it  paralyses." 


SPURIOUS  SOCIALISMS  53 

Experience  has  shown  that  Jules  Guesde  was 
right  in  saying  that  nationalisation  has  nothing  to 
do  with  Socialism  and  will  not  simplify  the  task 
of  Socialists.  The  railways  were  nationalised  in 
Tsarist  Russia,  and  have  long  been  nationalised 
in  Germany,  Italy,  Belgium,  Switzerland  and  most 
other  continental  countries.  The  Saar  mines  were 
nationalised  in  Prussia  some  years  ago.  The  sale 
of  alcoholic  drinks  was  a  State  monopoly  in  Tsarist 
Russia  ;  in  France  the  manufacture  and  distribu- 
tion of  tobacco  and  matches  are  State  monopolies 
and  pawnbroking  is  a  municipal  monopoly.  Tele- 
graphs and  telephones  are  nationalised  in  nearly  all 
countries.  Not  one  of  these  nationalisations  has 
improved  the  position  of  the  proletariat  or  done 
anything  to  promote  the  cause  of  Socialism. 

The  dangers  of  which  Jules  Guesde  speaks 
would,  however,  be  greatly  reduced  by  what  is 
called  in  France  "  industrialised  nationalisation," 
which  puts  the  industry  concerned  under  the  joint 
management  of  representatives  of  the  Government 
and  of  the  workers.  Such  a  system  has  been  pro- 
posed for  the  mines  by  the  Miners'  Federation  of 
Great  Britain,  but  the  scheme  is  still  a  little  too 
ttatiste,  for  it  provides  for  the  appointment  of  a 
Minister  of  Mines.  Any  nationalised  industry 
should  be  completely  autonomous,  financially  and 
otherwise,  as  is  the  Swiss  Federal  Railway,  and 
entirely  free  from  direct  Government  or  bureaucratic 
control.  There  is  no  Minister  of  Railways  in 
Switzerland.  The  Swiss  Federal  Railway  is,  in 
fact,  run  like  any  great  industrial  undertaking 


54    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

belonging  to  a  private  company,  with  the 
important  difference  that  it  has  no  dividends  to 
pay  to  shareholders  and  can,  therefore,  use  all 
its  profits  for  the *  improvement  of  the  service. 
Such  public  services  as  exist — the  posts,  telegraphs 
and  telephones,  for  example — should  be  removed 
from  the  control  of  Ministers  and  Government 
departments  and  put  under  autonomous  manage- 
ment of  the  same  kind  as  that  proposed  for  the 
mines.  The  same  system  should  be  applied  to 
municipal  services.  Any  proposed  nationalisation 
should  be  considered  simply  on  its  merits,  not 
regarded  as  a  "  step  towards  Socialism,"  for  that  it 
cannot  be.  And  in  no  case  should  any  industry  be 
nationalised  other  than  a  natural  monopoly  or  a 
public  service. 

Reformism,  then,  is  merely  an  extension  of  the 
functions  of  the  political  State  and  is  fundamentally 
opposed  to  economic  Socialism.  It  is  not  the  only 
spurious  form  of  Socialism.  There  are  all  the  social 
theories  based  on  some  religious  or  moral  principle, 
most  of  which  are  anti-individualist  and  would  be 
fatal  to  personal  liberty.  One  of  them  was  feudal 
Socialism,  as  Marx  and  Engels  called  it,  which 
attributed  all  the  evils  of  modern  society  to  per- 
sonal liberty  and  Protestantism,  and  recommended 
a  return  to  an  imaginary  past — a  Middle  Ages  of 
romance,  in  which  perfect  happiness  was  secured 
under  the  beneficent  influence  of  the  feudal  system 
and  the  Catholic  Church.  The  medievalists  still 
linger  among  us  in  the  form  of  "  Christian  Social- 
ists "  of  the  Catholic  type.  Some  years  ago  their 


SPURIOUS  SOCIALISMS  55 

activities  were  revived  by  the  Encyclical  Rerum 
Novarum  of  Leo  XIII.,  which  was  a  mere  summary 
of  the  commonplaces  of  mediaeval  moral  theolo- 
gians, in  which  a  system  of  individual  production 
was  taken  for  granted  and  peasant  proprietorship 
recommended  as  a  solution  of  the  land  question. 
The  activity  was,  however,  short-lived,  for  Rome 
took  fright  at  attempts  to  apply  the  principles  of 
Leo  XIII.  to  modern  conditions,  and  even  the  French 
and  Italian  "  Christian  Democratic  "  movements 
were  condemned  and  suppressed,  although  they 
advocated  nothing  more  dangerous  than  political 
democracy  and  mild  "  social  reforms."  Both  Pius 
IX.  and  Leo  XIII.  formally  condemned  "  that 
monstrous  system  called  Communism,  Socialism, 
or  Collectivism,"  as  well  as  "  liberalism."  The 
Roman  theologians  recognised  that  Socialism 
and  philosophic  liberalism  are  alike  fatal  to 
authority.  Moreover,  although  the  Catholic  Church 
would  no  doubt  tolerate  a  system  of  State  mono- 
poly, if  Church  property  were  left  intact,  it  will 
never  accept  Socialism,  since  the  socialisation  of 
the  means  of  production  involves  the  expropriation 
of  Church  property  with  the  rest.  The  Catholic  form 
of  pseudo-Socialism  is  based  on  the  mythicisation 
of  the  community,  which,  like  the  Church,  is 
endowed  with  a  mind,  a  memory  and  various  other 
personal  faculties.  It  is  merely  anti-individualism. 
There  are  excellent  people  that  propose  to  create 
a  Socialist  society,  or  what  they  believe  to  be  one, 
by  a  change  of  hearts.  Apart  from  the  objection 
that  the  process  might  last  till  doomsday,  no  change 


56    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

of  hearts  could  affect  economic  conditions.  The 
evils  of  an  economic  system  are  due  to  economic 
causes,  not  to  human  wickedness.  The  capitalist 
system  is  not  bad  because  the  capitalists  are  bad 
people — they  are  no  worse  than  anybody  else,  and 
if  a  workman  became  a  capitalist,  he  would  behave 
exactly  as  the  others  do.  Indeed,  we  know  by 
experience  that  that  is  the  case.  The  "  self-made  " 
man  is  often  the  most  exacting  of  employers. 
And,  even  if  everybody  suddenly  became  entirely 
disinterested  and  altruistic,  it  would  not  necessarily 
follow  that  a  perfect  social  system  would  be  arrived 
at,  or  even  a  better  than  the  present  one.  For  the 
most  disinterested  and  altruistic  people  may  make 
mistakes.  Well-intentioned  ignorance  and  stup- 
idity have  done  more  harm  in  the  world  than 
wickedness. 

No  satisfactory  social  order  can  be  based  on 
religious  or  moral  principles.  Religious  principles 
in  particular,  are,  as  Henri  Barbusse  has  said, 
"  at  once  too  personal  and  too  sovereign."  Faith, 
as  he  goes  on  to  say,  introduces  a  fixed  precept — 
a  dogma — "  which  makes  reason  useless,  puts  it 
out  of  court,  imposes  itself  despotically  by  super- 
natural means.  There  is  an  antagonism  between 
faith  and  reason  ;  they  destroy  each  other  even 
when  they  are  agreed."  *  If  it  is  futile  to  attempt 
to  reconcile  Socialism  with  historic  Christianity, 
it  is  equally  futile  to  try  to  deduce  it  from  pre- 
historic Christianity.  Jesus  had  and  could  have 
no  ideas  at  all  on  economic  questions.  Believing 
*  La  Lueur  dans  I'Abime,  p.  69. 


SPURIOUS  SOCIALISMS  57 

as  he  did  that  a  reign  of  perfect  justice  was  on  the 
point  of  being  established  on  earth  by  a  miraculous 
intervention  of  Jahweh,  he  was  not  concerned 
with  the  future  of  humanity,  which  was  thus  pro- 
vided for,  nor  with  economic  or  social  problems 
which  were  on  the  eve  of  receiving  a  drastic  and 
final  solution.  Hence  his  advice  to  his  followers 
to  take  no  thought  for  the  morrow,  to  cease  from 
toiling  and  spinning,  and  to  leave  their  heavenly 
Father  to  feed  and  clothe  them. 

It  is  often  said  that  the  Christianity  of  the 
Sermon  on  the  Mount  has  never  been  tried.  But 
it  has.  The  immediate  followers  of  Jesus  strictly 
obeyed  his  precepts,  formed  themselves  after  his 
death  into  a  community,  put  all  their  goods  in 
common,  ceased  to  do  any  work,  and  waited  for 
the  coming  of  the  Kingdom.  As  it  did  not  come, 
they  got  into  difficulties  when  their  common 
resources  were  exhausted,  and  the  early  Christian 
Communism  came  to  grief.  It  bore  no  resemblance 
to  the  scientific  Communism  of  Karl  Marx.  How 
difficult  it  was  to  get  rid  of  the  habit  of  not  working 
among  primitive  Christians  is  shown  by  St  Paul's 
denunciation  of  it.  Another  attempt  to  revive 
prehistoric  Christianity  was  made  by  St  Francis 
of  Assisi,  who  ordered  his  followers  to  earn  and  own 
nothing,  to  live  by  begging  as  Jesus  had  instructed 
his  apostles  to  do,  and  to  have  nowhere  to  lay 
their  heads.  During  the  life  of  St  Francis  his 
marvellous  personality  made  the  movement  a 
great  religious  force,  but  within  a  comparatively 
short  time  after  his  death  the  Franciscans  had 


58    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

become  a  public  nuisance  and  the  very  name  of 
friar  a  byword.  As  Christianity  survived  by 
discarding  most  of  the  teaching  of  Jesus  or  explain- 
ing it  away,  so  the  Franciscan  Order  survived  by 
abandoning  the  essential  principles  of  the  Rule  of 
St  Francis.  Modern  Franciscans  do  not  live  by 
begging  and  have  roofs  under  which  to  lay  their 
heads.  The  injunction  of  St  Francis  that  they 
were  not  even  to  own  collective  property  is  evaded 
by  vesting  the  property  of  the  Order  in  the  Pope  ; 
and  those  Franciscans  that  still  observe  the  rule 
that  they  must  never  carry  money  are  accompanied 
by  a  layman  who  carries  it  for  them,  just  as  Tolstoi 
transferred  his  property  to  his  wife. 

The  confusion  of  Socialism  with  prehistoric 
Christianity  has  led  to  the  strange  notion  that 
Socialism  is  an  ascetic  creed  whose  ideal  is  universal 
poverty.  Socialism  is  rather  hedonist  than  ascetic  : 
at  least  it  aims  at  happiness  for  everybody  in  this 
life,  whereas  Christianity  tells  people  to  look  for 
happiness  in  another,  which  has  taken  the  place  of 
the  Kingdom  that  did  not  come.  Poverty,  far 
from  being  holy  or  blessed,  is  for  Socialism  one  of 
the  worst  of  evils.  If  people  would  only  grasp 
that,  they  would  not  talk  nonsense  about  the 
inconsistency  of  a  rich  man,  who,  although  he  is 
a  Socialist,  does  not  divest  himself  of  his  riches 
and,  presumably,  distribute  them  to  the  poor. 
When  a  Socialist  is  a  rich  man,  there  is  a  strong 
presumption  of  his  sincerity,  and  the  best  use  he  can 
make  of  his  wealth  is  to  spend  as  much  of  it  as 
possible  on  propagating  Socialist  ideas.  A  wealthy 


SPURIOUS  SOCIALISMS  59 

Socialist  should  not  set  an  example  of  luxury  and 
ostentation,  because  his  money  can  be  better 
spent  in  the  way  just  indicated,  but  it  is  ridiculous 
to  suppose  that  it  is  contrary  to  Socialist  principles 
to  enjoy  a  good  dinner  or  wear  a  pretty  frock, 
or  that  a  Socialist  should  lead  the  life  of  a  hermit 
in  the  desert.  The  silliest  charge  that  can  be  made 
against  a  Socialist  is  that  of  not  "  practising  what 
he  preaches,"  as  if  anybody  living  in  one  economic 
system  could  "  practise  "  another. 

Such  sentimental  notions,  which  are  inspired 
by  the  spirit  that  led  to  Communist  settlements 
and  similar  Utopian  schemes,  arise  from  ignorance 
of  the  fact  that  Socialism  is  a  purely  economic 
theory  that  has  nothing  to  do  with  any  religious, 
moral  or  philosophical  beliefs.  It  is  a  scientific 
hypothesis  founded  on  reason,  not  on  faith  or 
feeling.  Therefore,  we  cannot  make  common 
cause  with  a  so-called  Socialism  deduced  from 
religious  principles,  since  it  must  inevitably  be  a 
dogmatic  creed  which  neither  springs  from  econ- 
omic conditions  nor  can  be  adapted  to  them. 
That  does  not  mean  that  we  will  not  work  with  a 
Christian  or  adherent  of  any  other  religion  if  he 
accepts  Socialism  on  economic  grounds.  But  a 
Roman  Catholic  that  tries  to  be  a  Socialist  will  find 
sooner  or  later  that  he  will  have  to  choose  between 
his  Socialism  and  his  Church.  There  can  be  no 
reconciliation  between  the  principle  of  authority 
and  its  opposite.  A  French  or  Italian  Catholic 
that  joined  a  Socialist  society  or  publicly  advocated 
Socialism  would  probably  be  refused  the  sacra- 


60    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

ments  at  once.  In  Protestant  countries  the  Church 
is  obliged  to  be  more  tolerant,  but,  if  and  when  the 
social  revolution  comes,  the  whole  power  and 
influence  of  the  Church  will  be  used  against  it. 
For  the  Catholic  Church  is  as  completely  identified 
with  the  capitalist  system  as  it  was  with  the 
feudal  system  in  the  Middle  Ages.  The  great 
religious  orders  are  capitalist  corporations.  One 
of  the  causes  of  the  influence  of  the  Jesuits  in  the 
Church  is  an  economic  one — the  great  wealth  of 
the  Society  of  Jesus.  What  is  true  of  the  Catholic 
Church  is  true  in  varying  degrees  of  all  the  Churches: 
they  are  part  and  parcel  of  the  capitalist  system. 
In  a  speech  at  the  American  Inter-Church  Confer- 
ence in  1920,  Mr  Roger  W.  Babson  said  :  "  Religion 
is  the  best  guarantee  of  our  investments."  He  was 
quite  right. 


CHAPTER  V. 

MARXIST  SOCIALISM. 

KARL  MARX  and  Frederick  Engels  were  the  founders 
of  modern  Socialism,  which  may  be  said  to  date  from 
their  Manifesto  of  the  Communist  Party,  published 
in  1848.  In  his  preface  to  the  English  trans- 
lation of  the  Manifesto  published  in  1888,  Engels 
explains  why  they  used  the  term  "  Communism  "  in 
preference  to  "  Socialism."  The  name  "  Socialist," 
he  says,  was  given  in  1848  to  the  adherents  of 
various  Utopian  systems,  and  "  whatever  portion 
of  the  working  class  had  become  convinced  of  the 
insufficiency  of  mere  political  revolution  and  had 
proclaimed  the  necessity  of  a  social  change,  that 
portion  then  called  itself  Communist."  In  course 
of  time,  however,  it  was  found  that  the  term 
"  Communism "  was  easily  misunderstood  and 
taken  to  mean  the  entire  abolition  of  all  private 
property,  even  in  tooth-brushes  and  pocket-hand- 
kerchiefs, and  the  sharing  of  all  things  in  common. 
The  term  "  Socialism,"  therefore,  came  into  more 
general  use  and  by  1888,  as  Engels'  preface  shows, 
the  two  terms  had  become  synonyms,  but  "  Social- 
ism "  was  much  more  used.  A  more  accurate 
term  than  either  is  "  Collectivism,"  which  exactly 
expresses  the  idea  of  collective  ownership  of  the 

61 


62    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

means  of  production.  It  was,  if  I  am  not  mistaken, 
coined  by  Bakunin  ;  at  any  rate  it  was  the  term 
that  he  preferred  and  he  called  himself  a  "  Revolu- 
tionary Collectivist."  The  three  terms  are  synony- 
mous and  connote  the  same  economic  theory ; 
they  have  been  used  interchangeably  by  all  the 
eminent  Socialist  writers  of  the  last  half  century. 
For  instance,  the  French  Marxist,  Jules  Guesde, 
in  one  of  his  best-known  pamphlets  on  Collectivism, 
explains  that  by  "  Collectivism "  he  means  the 
"  scientific  Communism  "  of  Karl  Marx. 

The  term  "  Communism  "  has  now  been  revived 
by  the  Russian  Bolsheviks  and  is  used  by  the 
members  of  the  Third  (Communist)  International 
to  distinguish  themselves  from  other  Socialists. 
The  wisdom  of  its  revival  is  doubtful,  for  the  term 
is  still  open  to  the  misconceptions  that  caused  it 
to  be  dropped  and  it  is,  in  fact,  generally  misunder- 
stood. Few  people  realise  that  by  "  Communism  " 
is  meant  what  has  hitherto  been  popularly  called  in 
all  the  Western  countries  "Marxist  Socialism."  One 
can  hardly  open  a  newspaper  or  talk  about  "  Bol- 
shevism "  to  a  person  unversed  in  Socialist  theory 
and  economic  terms  without  realising  that.  This 
objection  is  so  strongly  felt  by  French  Socialists 
that,  when  the  French  Socialist  Party  affiliated 
itself  to  the  Third  International,  it  asked  and 
obtained  permission  to  retain  its  old-  title.  In 
England  the  term  "  Collectivism  " — preferred  by 
the  man  whose  auti-etatiste  and  libertarian  opinions 
caused  his  expulsion  as  an  anarchist  from  the  First 
International — has  come  to  be  applied  by  many 


MARXIST  SOCIALISM  63 

people  to  State  Socialism  or  Reformism,  perhaps 
because  it  is  the  favourite  term  of  Fabian  writers. 
This  misuse  of  a  useful  term  is  unfortunate,  for 
it  has  made  it  also  open  to  misunderstanding 
when  used  in  its  proper  sense.  In  these  circum- 
stances it  seems  preferable  to  use  the  term 
"  Socialism." 

Marxist  Socialism  or  Communism  does  not  mean 
the  entire  abolition  of  private  property,  but  only 
that  of  private  property  in  the  means  of  production 
— of  monopolist  or  bourgeois  property.  This  could 
be  shown  by  innumerable  quotations  from  the  works 
of  Marx  and  Engels.  It  will  be  enough  to  quote 
two  sentences  from  the  Communist  Manifesto  of 
1848  :  "  The  distinguishing  feature  of  Communism 
is  not  the  abolition  of  property  generally,  but 
the  abolition  of  bourgeois  property."  And  again  : 
"  Communism  deprives  no  man  of  the  power  to 
appropriate  the  products  of  society  :  all  that  it 
does  is  to  deprive  him  of  the  power  to  subjugate 
the  labour  of  others  by  means  of  such  appropria- 
tion." Socialism  would,  indeed,  extend  private 
property  in  the  products  of  labour,  for  at  present 
the  great  majority  of  people  have  none  to  speak  of. 
The  entire  abolition  of  private  property  is  not 
merely  Utopian :  it  would  be  mischievous  and  an 
unjustifiable  interference  with  personal  liberty. 
Private  property  in  the  means  of  production 
interferes  with  the  liberty  of  others ;  private 
property  in  the  products  does  not.  No  man's  life 
would  be  complete  without  some  personal  belong- 
ings, each  with  its  own  particular  association. 


64    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

To  abolish  private  property  entirely  would  be  to 
diminish  personality,  for  a  man's  belongings  are 
part  of  himself.  The  entire  abolition  of  private 
property  is  a  religious  rather  than  an  economic 
theory.  It  is,  of  course,  the  principle  of  religious 
orders  and  is  an  attempt  to  realise  "  holy  poverty  " 
— which  has  not  always  succeeded,  for  the  right 
to  use  common  property  may  result  in  practice 
in  very  comfortable  conditions.  A  system  of 
common  property  in  all  things  is  called  "  Utopian 
Communism  "  to  distinguish  it  from  the  "  scientific 
Communism  "  of  Marx  and  Engels. 

As  has  been  said,  Marxist  Socialism  is  not  etatiste, 
but  the  opposite.     It  is  necessary  to  insist  on  this 
fact,  since  an  extraordinary  ignorance  of  Marxism 
is  general  in  England.     For  instance,  the  brilliant 
writer  that  uses  the  pseudonym  "  A  Student  of 
Politics,"    in    an    article    on    the    British    Labour 
Party  published   in  the  Times  in  February  1921, 
attributed   the   State   Socialist   tendencies   of   the 
Parliamentary  Labour  Party  to  Karl  Marx.     "  The 
party,"  he  said,  "  will  never  do  anything  with  this 
German-Jewish    tin-can    of    State    Socialism    tied 
to  its  tail."     I  agree  with  him  that  it  is  most 
unfortunate  that  the  Labour  Party  is  so  saturated 
with  Reformism  and  wastes  so  much  energy  on 
demanding    all    sorts    of    nationalisations,    except 
1  the    most    important — that    of    the    land.     But 
Reformism  or  State  Socialism  is  not   "  German- 
Jewish."     Although  it  has  unfortunately  been  ex- 
ported to  other  countries,  it  is  a  genuine  British  pro- 
duct and  the  Marxists,  whatever  their  nationality, 


MARXIST  SOCIALISM  65 

are  among  its  strongest  opponents.  Everybody  has 
not  time  to  read  Das  Capital,  which,  moreover, 
is  not  easy  reading,  but  "A  Student  of  Politics  " 
might,  in  the  course  of  his  studies,  have  opened 
La  Guerre  civile  en  France.  There  he  would  have 
found  Marx  declaring  that  the  State  is  "  a  public 
force  organised  for  social  servitude,"  the  "  engine  of 
the  despotism  of  a  class,"  and  that  it  must  be 
replaced  by  "  the  free  federation  of  all  men." 
He  would  find  Engels  saying  in  Anti-Duhring 
that  the  State  is  "  the  organisation  of  the  exploiting 
class  ...  to  maintain  by  force  the  exploited 
class  in  the  conditions  of  oppression  demanded  by 
the  existing  method  of  production,"  and  pointing 
out  elsewhere  that  the  State  has  not  always  existed 
and  "  will  inevitably  collapse  "  when  classes  dis- 
appear, that  is  to  say,  when  a  Socialist  society  comes 
into  being.  This  idea  permeates  all  the  writings 
of  Marx  and  Engels  and  of  every  Marxist  Socialist 
— Paul  Lafargue  and  Jules  Guesde,  Kautsky  and 
Emile  Vandervelde,  no  less  than  Lenin  himself. 
There  is  no  country  in  Europe  where  the  great 
"  German -Jewish  "  economist,  who  belongs  to  the 
world,  has  had  so  little  influence  as  in  England,  and 
no  country  where  State  Socialism  has  had  so  much. 
In  Germany  theoretical  Reformism  is  almost 
unknown  among  Socialists  ;  the  German  "  State 
Socialists  "  are  to  be  found  among  the  disciples 
of  Bismarck,  not  among  those  of  Marx. 

Theoretically,  Marxist  Socialism  is  entirely  com- 
patible with  personal  liberty.  Its  aim  is  the  trans- 
formation of  existing  society  into  "  a  great  economic 


66    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

co-operative  "  by  the  socialisation  of  the  means  of 
production.  Nothing  could  be  more  libertarian 
than  the  definition  of  Socialist  society  in  the  Com- 
munist Manifesto  of  1848  :  "  an  association  in 
which  the  free  development  of  each  is  the  condition 
for  the  free  development  of  all."  This  definition 
starts  from  the  individual  :  all  are  to  be  free 
because  each  is  free.  Nevertheless,  as  I  have 
already  said,  there  is  a  centralising  tendency  in 
Marxism  which  might,  in  practice,  result  in  a 
system  dangerous  to  personal  liberty.  Kautsky, 
indeed,  speaks  of  the  "  centralisation  "  of  the  means 
of  production,  and  that  phrase  is  used  in  the  basis 
of  the  Second  International,  which  also  pledges 
the  parties  affiliated  to  the  International  to  the 
"  conquest  of  political  power  by  the  proletariat," 
that  is  to  say,  the  dictatorship  of  the  proletariat. 
It  is  plain  that  a  single  association  or  "  co-opera- 
tive "  composed  of  a  whole  nation  would  lead 
inevitably  to  a  strong  central  administration,  for 
a  whole  people  cannot  directly  manage  production. 
It  would  appear,  however,  from  what  Marx  said 
about  the  Paris  Commune,  that  he  had  no  objection 
to  the  choice  of  a  smaller  unit  than  the  nation. 
There  is  nothing  in  the  Marxist  theory  necessarily 
incompatible  with  the  existence  in  a  Socialist  society 
of  various  forms  of  association  and  voluntary  com- 
binations. Indeed,  as  M.  Vandervelde  has  said,  the 
organisation  of  labour  by  the  workers  is  inconceiv- 
able without "  the  individual  and  collective  self-help 
of  the  working  class,  a  vast  organic  development  x>f 
trade  unions,  co-operative  societies  and  association 


MARXIST  SOCIALISM  67 

in  every  form."  *  The  only  alternative  would  be 
the  monopolisation  of  production  by  an  omnipotent 
State,  and  to  that  Marx  was  definitely  opposed. 

Marxism,  like  all  forms  of  Socialism  antecedent 
to  Guild  Socialism,  preserved  the  democratist  error 
of  concentrating  all  functions  in  the  hands  of  a 
single  body  of  men.  But  the  greatest  danger  of  the 
Marxist  system,  in  my  opinion,  is  the  method  that 
it  proposes  for  the  transition  from  a  capitalist  to  a 
Socialist  society,  which  will  be  dealt  with  in  the  next 
chapter.  Marx  was  not  infallible,  although  there 
seem  to  be  people  nowadays  that  imagine  him  to 
have  been  so.  His  theories  were  hypotheses  and 
never  pretended  to  be  anything  else ;  he  never 
intended  them  to  be  erected  into  dogmas.  There 
has  been  an  immense  contribution  to  the  study  of 
Socialist  theory  since  Marx's  works  were  published 
and  many  modifications  of  his  theory  have  become 
necessary.  It  would  be  strange  if  that  were  not' 
the  case,  seeing  that  he  has  been  dead  for  forty 
years  and  conditions  have  greatly  altered.  Nothing 
could  be  more  contrary  to  the  scientific  spirit  of 
Marx  than  the  tendency  of  those  that  call  them- 
selves "  pure  "  Communists  to  impose  his  economic 
hypotheses  as  dogmas.  Marx  would  be  surprised 
and  disgusted  to  find  himself  transformed  into  the 
founder  of  a  religion.  Like  the  adherents  of  most 
religions,  the  faithful  of  the  Third  International 
take  the  doctrines  of  their  founder  that  appeal  to 
them  and  discard  the  others.  The  doctrine  on 
which  they  insist  the  most  is  that  of  the  dictator- 
*  Le  Socialisme  contre  I'Etat,  p.  69. 


68    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

ship  of  the  proletariat,  which  has  taken  in  their 
creed  a  place  out  of  all  proportion  to  its  importance 
and  has  become  the  end  instead  of  the  means. 
One  notices  that  the  remedy  proposed  in  many 
Communist  publications  for  the  evils  of  existing 
society  is  no  longer  Communism,  but  the  dictator- 
ship of  the  proletariat. 

On  the  other  hand  the  "  pure  "  Communists  fly 
in  the  face  of  Marx's  teaching  about  the  conditions 
necessary  to  a  successful  Communist  experiment. 
Both  Marx  and  Engels  considered  that  an  essential 
condition  of  the  social  revolution  in  any  country  was 
that  the  proletariat  should  be  the  majority  of  the 
population.  Nothing  could  be  more  contrary  to 
all  their  ideas  than  a  social  revolution  by  a  coup 
d'etat  of  a  minority.  "  All  previous  historical  move- 
ments," says  the  Communist  Manifesto,  "  were 
movements  of  minorities,  or  in  the  interest  of 
minorities.  The  proletarian  movement  is  the  self- 
conscious,  independent  movement  of  the  immense 
majority,  in  the  interest  of  the  immense  majority." 
From  that  attitude  Marx  and  Engels  never  swerved. 
They  would,  therefore,  certainly  have  held  that  a 
Communist  experiment  should  not  have  been 
attempted  in  a  country  like  Russia.  Communism 
was  possible,  in  their  opinion,  only  in  a  highly 
industrialised  country.  They  would  have  been 
equally  opposed  to  the  view  that  a  revolution  should 
be  made  by  the  Communist  Party,  still  more  to  a 
dictatorship  of  that  party  over  the  proletariat. 
"  The  Communists,"  they  said,  "  do  not  form  a 
separate  party  opposed  to  other  working-class 


MARXIST  SOCIALISM  69 

parties.  They  have  no  interests  separate  and  apart 
from  those  of  the  proletariat  as  a  whole.  They  do 
not  set  up  any  sectarian  principles  of  their  own, 
by  which  to  shape  and  mould  the  proletarian  move- 
ment." The  Third  International  is  opposed  to  all 
other  working-class  parties  ;  it  is  nothing  if  not 
sectarian  ;  and  it  attempts  not  merely  to  shape 
and  mould  the  international  proletarian  movement, 
but  to  dictate  to  it  even  in  matters  of  local  policy. 
The  leaders  of  the  German  Communist  Party  had  to 
resign  from  its  Executive  in  February  1921,  merely 
because  they  expressed  the  opinion  that  the  policy 
of  the  Executive  of  the  Third  International  in 
Italy  had  been  unwise. 

Marx  and  Engels  believed  that  the  workers  must 
effect  their  own  emancipation.  The  "  pure  "  Com- 
munists, who  propose  to  effect  it  for  them,  are  in 
every  country  led  principally  by  bourgeois  intel- 
lectuals— mostly  of  the  literary  profession — many 
of  whom  are  disillusioned  sentimental  pacifists  or 
former  emotional  patriots.  The  Third  Interna- 
tional has  more  hold  on  the  Socialist  parties, 
which  contain  a  large  bourgeois  element  and  are 
usually  under  bourgeois  leadership,  than  on  the 
purely  proletarian  organisations.  In  Italy,  for 
instance,  in  1921,  the  "  pure "  Communists  got 
34  per  cent,  of  the  votes  at  the  Congress  of  the 
Socialist  Party  and  only  22  per  cent,  at  the  Trade 
Union  Congress.  Yet  the  Italian  Trade  Unionists 
are  the  most  revolutionary  in  the  world  and  their 
confederation  is  officially  pledged  to  Marxist 
Socialism.  It  is  also  significant  that  a  large  pro- 


70    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

portion  of  the  recruits  of  the  Third  International 
are  men  that  became  Socialists  during  the  War, 
who  have  very  little  economic  knowledge  and  whose 
Socialism  is  to  a  large  extent  a  vague  desire  for 
revolution,  arising  from  a  natural  disgust  with 
existing  society.  In  every  country  except  Russia 
itself  the  great  majority  of  the  Socialists  with  any 
great  competence  in  economic  matters — and  especi- 
ally the  majority  of  Marxist  scholars — are  outside 
the  Third  International. 

In  fact,  the  policy  of  the  Third  International  is 
in  contradiction  with  the  most  fundamental  prin- 
ciple of  Marxism — the  economic  or  materialist 
interpretation  of  history.  The  soundness  of  that 
principle  is  more  and  more  demonstrated  as  time 
goes  on.  Of  course,  it  can  be  exaggerated — perhaps 
Marx  himself  exaggerated  it  a  little.  The  economic 
factor  is  not  the  only  one  in  history.  But  it  is  the 
predominant  factor,  as  is  natural  enough,  seeing 
that  the  need  of  finding  the  means  of  subsistence 
is  the  primary  need  of  humanity.  According  to 
Marx,  Socialism  arises  naturally  from  existing  con- 
ditions. Economic  causes  are  leading  inevitably 
to  Socialism,  just  as  they  led  to  the  break-up  of 
mediaeval  society,  to  the  Renaissance,  to  the  indi- 
vidualist revolt  and  the  industrial  revolution.  The 
Socialist  theory  merely  expresses  in  general  terms 
actual  relations  springing  from  an  existing  class- 
struggle,  and  it  can  be  practically  applied  only 
where  the  class-struggle  has  reached  a  certain 
stage  and|taken  a  certain  form. 

The  class- war  is  not  a  doctrine  or  an  opinion  or  a 


MARXIST  SOCIALISM  71 

policy  :  it  is  a  fact.  It  is  the  inevitable  consequence 
of  the  existence  of  different  classes  with  conflicting 
interests.  It  has  always  existed.  There  was  a  class- 
war  between  the  feudal  lords  and  the  serfs  or  the 
mediaeval  Communes.  From  time  to  time  it  became 
violent,  as  in  the  famous  "  Jacquerie  "  in  France 
and  the  insurrection  of  John  Ball  in  England, 
and  in  such  incidents  as  the  revolt  of  the 
people  of  Laon  in  1116  against  their  bishop  and 
feudal  lord,  whom  they  hacked  to  death.  But  the 
class-war  has  become  acute  only  in  modern  indus- 
trial countries  and,  the  larger  the  proletariat  and 
the  stronger  their  Trade  Unions,  the  more  acute  it 
becomes.  It  is,  indeed,  making  the  capitalist 
system  unworkable.  Trade  Union  regulations, 
being  purely  negative,  are  sometimes  a  hindrance 
to  production,  but  they  are  necessary  in  existing 
conditions  to  maintain  the  workmen's  standard 
of  living.  Employers  complain,  with  some  reason, 
that  they-«an  no  longer  manage  their  businesses  ; 
workmen,  on  the  other  hand,  are  becoming 
more  and  more  unwilling  to  work  to  earn  profits 
for  employers.  Both  consider  only  their  own 
interests.  It  is  futile  to  blame  either  side.  The 
only  solution  is  to  alter  radically  the  economic 
system  and  get  rid  of  classes  and  thus  get  rid  of 
the  class-war.  The  alternative  is  deadlock. 
That  is  why,  on  Marxist  principles,  the  industrial 
countries  are  ripe  for  Socialism. 


CHAPTER  VI. 

DICTATORSHIP  OF  THE  PROLETARIAT. 

MARX  and  Engels  conceived  the  conquest  of  poli- 
tical power  by  the  proletariat  to  be  the  first  step 
towards  Socialism.  Political  power  properly  so 
called  was,  in  their  opinion,  "  the  organised  power 
of  one  class  for  oppressing  another."  The  prole- 
tariat was  to  seize  political  power — by  what  means 
does  not  matter — in  order  to  become  the  ruling 
class — the  State — but  only  for  the  purpose  of  sweep- 
ing away  the  conditions  that  produce  classes  and 
with  them  their  own  supremacy  as  a  class.  This  is 
the  famous  collective  and  impersonal  dictatorship 
of  the  proletariat,  of  which  so  much  has  been  heard 
of  late.  The  phrase  is  not  very  accurate,  for  dicta- 
torship, strictly  speaking,  means  the  arbitrary  rule 
of  a  single  individual.  But,  since  Marx  and  Engels 
regarded  political  power  as  in  itself  oppressive,  it 
was  only  straining  to  some  extent  the  sense  of  the 
term  "  dictatorship  "  to  apply  it  to  the  conquest  and 
exercise  of  political  power.  The  phrase  "  dictator- 
ship of  the  proletariat  "  does  not  occur  in  Marx's 
published  works.  He  used  it  once — in  1875 — in 
the  following  passage  of  a  private  letter  : — 

"  There  lies  between  the  capitalist  and  Com- 
munist    society    a    period     of    revolutionary 

72 


DICTATORSHIP  OF  THE  PROLETARIAT    73 

transformation  of  one  into  the  other.  This 
period  has  a  corresponding  political  period  of 
transition,  during  which  the  State  can  be 
nothing  else  than  a  revolutionary  dictator- 
ship of  the  proletariat." 

But  the  idea  expressed  by  the  phrase  was  an 
essential  part  of  Marx's  theory  and  is  already  to  be 
found  in  the  Communist  Manifesto  of  1848.  The 
dictatorship  of  the  proletariat — its  organisation  as 
the  ruling  class — was  not,  then,  in  the  view  of  Marx 
and  Engels,  the  final  form  of  Socialist  society,  but 
a  temporary  measure  to  effect  the  transition  from 
one  society  to  another. 

According  to  this  conception  the  proletariat  is  to 
oppress  or  dominate  the  bourgeoisie  temporarily, 
until  the  latter  is  extinguished,  not  by  the  exter- 
mination of  the  bourgeois,  but  by  their  conversion 
or  that  of  their  children  into  workers,  so  that  there 
will  be  a  single  class,  that  is  to  say,  no  classes  at  all. 
The  exact  form  of  the  so-called  dictatorship  might 
vary  in  different  countries.  For  instance,  although 
in  Russia  at  present  the  bourgeoisie  is  excluded 
from  the  franchise,  Lenin  declares  that  to  be  due  to 
the  particular  conditions  of  Russia  and  does  not 
anticipate  that  "  the  impending  proletarian  revolu- 
tion in  Europe  will,  all  or  for  the  most  part,"  be 
necessarily  accompanied  by  such  a  restriction  of 
the  franchise.  There  was  no  such  restriction  in  the 
Paris  Commune,  which  Engels  cited  as  an  example 
of  the  dictatorship  of  the  proletariat.  It  is  true 
that,  as  Lenin  says,  a  great  part  of  the  bourgeoisie 
had  fled  from  Paris  to  Versailles.  The  persons 


74    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

legally  disfranchised  in  Russia  are  such  as  "  employ 
hired  labour  with  a  view  to  profit,"  not  those  that 
were  bourgeois  before  the  revolution,  as  were  nearly 
all  the  Communist  leaders.  In  practice,  no  doubt, 
the  franchise  is  denied  to  counter-revolutionaries 
and,  after  all,  in  the  course  of  a  revolution,  revolu- 
tionaries and  counter-revolutionaries  can  hardly 
work  together.  Royalists  were  not  admitted  into 
the  National  Convention  during  the  French  Revolu- 
tion. Far  too  much  has  been  made  of  this  unim- 
portant matter  by  opponents  of  the  Bolsheviks. 

The  primary  purpose  of  the  dictatorship  of  the 
proletariat,  as  Marx  and  Engels  understobd  it,  was 
to  break  up  the  existing  State  machine.  Hence  the 
Paris  Commune  was  an  example  of  it,  because  it 
destroyed  parliamentarism,  the  army,  the  bureau- 
cracy, and  "  that  parasitical^ incubus,  the  State." 
The  Parisian  workers  invested  the  State  "  with 
a  revolutionary  and  temporary  form "  in  order 
to  destroy  it.  That  Socialism  is  impossible  and 
cannot  even  begin  to  be  possible  until  the  existing 
State  machine  is  smashed,  seems  to  me  evident. 
The  Bolsheviks  were  quite  right  in  dissolving  the 
Constituent  Assembly.  For  Socialism,  to  quote 
M.  Vandervelde,  "  is  nothing  less  than  a  revolu- 
tion." That  does  not  necessarily  mean  that  it  can 
be  brought  about  only  by  violence.  Theoretically, 
a  revolution  might  be  quite  peaceful.  But  the 
question  is  :  not  whether  Socialists  wish  to  use 
violence,  but  whether  the  capitalist  class  will  use 
it  to  prevent  Socialism.  I  think  it  will,  if  it  can. 
It  has  already  resorted  to  organised  violence  in 


DICTATORSHIP  OF  THE  PROLETARIAT    75 

Italy  %nd  in  the  United  States.  Both  the  actual 
revolutions  in  Russia  were  accompanied  by  little 
violence  and  bloodshed — less  than  in  the  case  of 
most  revolutions  in  history.  Most  of  the  violence 
has  occurred  since,  and  has  been  mainly  by  way  of 
self-defence  against  counter-revolutionary  violence 
encouraged  and  subsidised  by  foreign  capitalist 
Governments.  However  much  a  man  may  dislike 
violence,  he  must  use  it  in  self-defence,  if  it  be  used 
against  him,  unless  he  agrees  with  Jesus,  St  Francis, 
Tolstoi  and  the  Society  of  Friends  that  the  use  of 
force  is  never  justifiable  in  any  circumstances.  For 
my  part,  although  I  recognise  the  possibilities  of 
passive  resistance — which  is  not  at  all  the  same 
thing  as  turning  the  other  cheek — I  am  not  pre- 
pared to  say  that  it  would  always  be  successful, 
still  less  to  subscribe  to  any  dogma  excluding  the 
use  of  force  in  all  circumstances. 

The  vast  majority  of  mankind — and  of  Christians 
— agree  with  me  in  this  regard,  not  with  Jesus,  St 
Francis,  Tolstoi  and  the  Society  of  Friends.  They 
hold  violence  to  be  sometimes  justifiable.  The  real 
opinion  of  most  people  on  the  subject  is  that  violence 
is  all  right  when  it  is  used  on  their  own  side — for 
example,  by  the  Black  and  Tans  in  Ireland — and  all 
wrong  when  it  is  used  against  them — for  example, 
by  the  German  army  in  Belgium.  This  is  rather 
too  simplist  a  view.  Two  must  be  allowed  to  play 
at  the  game.  Ardent  supporters  of  the  War,  or  of 
the  forcible  repression  of  the  Sinn  Feiners,  denounc- 
ing the  Bolsheviks  for  using  violence,  make  them- 
selves ridiculous.  The  Bolsheviks  use  violence,  like 


76    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

other  governments,  to  repress  revolt  against  their 
authority,  and  also  use  it  to  achieve  what  they 
believe  to  be  the  salvation  of  humanity.  They 
may  be  mistaken  :  but  the  idealist  supporters  of 
the  War  have  turned  out  to  have  been  quite  mis- 
taken about  its  results.  If  violence  is  permissible 
in  what  a  nation  or  a  government  believes,  rightly 
or  wrongly,  to  be  a  good  cause,  it  is  permissible  in 
what  any  other  group  of  people  believe,  rightly 
or  wrongly,  to  be  a  good  cause.  For  a  nation  or  a 
government  is  no  more  infallible  than  any  other 
collectivity  or  than  an  individual.  Moreover,  no 
distinction  can  logically  be  drawn  between  inter- 
national and  civil  war.  Indeed,  as  Anatole  France 
has  said,  civil  war  is  usually  the  more  reasonable 
and  therefore  the  more  justifiable  of  the  two,  for 
it  is  usually  fought  on  an  issue  that  really  matters 
to  the  combatants,  who  know  what  they  are  fighting 
about.  The  civil  war  are  the  wars  that  have  had 
the  most  satisfactory  results.  I  should  say  that 
the  English  civil  war  of  the  seventeenth  century 
was  the  most  justifiable  war  in  our  history. 

If,  however,  a  revolution  is,  at  least  theoretically, 
possible  without  violence,  it  is  not  possible  without 
unconstitutional  methods.  The  resolution  of  the 
Amsterdam  Socialist  Congress  forbidding  Socialists 
to  participate  in  a  bourgeois  Government  was 
merely  the  recognition  of  an  obvious  incompati- 
bility. Socialists  would  stultify  themselves  if  they 
took  the  responsibility  of  becoming  Ministers  of  the 
Crown,  and  thus  assumed  the  duty  of  defending  it, 
the  Constitution,  and  the  bourgeois  State.  And, 


DICTATORSHIP  OF  THE  PROLETARIAT    77 

if  a  Socialist  government  tried  to  expropriate  the 
capitalists  by  Act  of  Parliament,  the  latter  would 
at  once  resort  to  unconstitutional  action,  if  they 
were  strong  enough.  The  case  of  Ulster  has  shown 
us  that  constitutionalists  do  not  hesitate  to  act 
unconstitutionally  when  it  suits  their  purpose. 
Marx  and  Engels,  then,  were  right  in  insisting  on 
the  necessity  of  smashing  the  existing  State  machine 
and  on  that  point  every  Socialist  must  agree  with 
them,  although  Reformists  or  etatistcs  naturally 
do  not. 

Whether  the  method  by  which  they  proposed  to 
achieve  that  end  is  the  only  one,  or  even  the  best, 
is,  however,  another  matter.  The  dictatorship  of 
the  proletariat  involves  the  centralisation  of  "  all 
instruments  of  production  in  the  hands  of  the 
State,  that  is,  of  the  proletariat  organised  as  the 
ruling  class."  It  is  true  that,  when  this  temporary 
system  of  centralised  State  Socialism  has  done  its 
work,  we  are  promised,  in  place  of  the  old  bour- 
geois society,  with  its  classes  and  class  antagonisms,  7 
"  an  association  in  which  the  free  development  ol 
each  is  the  condition  for  the  free  development  of 
all."  Nothing  could  be  more  attractive  to  a 
libertarian  Socialist,  if  he  could  be  sure  of  that 
result.  But  the  weak  point  in  the  Marxist  system 
is  that  it  fails  to  show  how  the  result  will  be  obtained, 
or  to  give  any  satisfactory  assurance  that  it  will 
be  obtained  at  all.  During  the  transition  period, 
production  is  to  be  "  concentrated  in  the  hands  of  a 
vast  association  of  the  whole  nation."  That  means, 
in  practice,  in  the  hands  of  a  bureaucracy,  for  a 


\ 


78    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

whole  nation  cannot  manage  production  directly. 
It  is  not  easy  to  see  how  such  a  system  would 
develop  into  the  "  free  federation  of  all  men."  It 
seems  much  more  likely  that,  when  the  conditions 
for  the  existence  of  class  antagonisms  had  been 
swept  away,  the  people  in  power  would  find  all 
sorts  of  excellent  reasons  for  staying  in  power. 
"It  is  perfectly  absurd,"  said  Engels,  "  to  talk 
about  a  free  popular  State  ;  so  long  as  the  prole- 
tariat needs  the  State,  it  needs  it  not  in  the  interest 
of  freedom,  but  in  order  to  suppress  its  opponents, 
and,  when  it  becomes  possible  to  speak  of  freedom, 
the  State  as  such  ceases  to  exist."  But,  in  practice, 
will  the  State  cease  to  exist  ?  I  doubt  it  very  much. 
It  is  much  more  likely  to  become  stronger  than  ever. 
A  centralised  system  of  State  Socialism  will  never 
lead  to  anything,  in  my  opinion,  but  more  and 
more  State  and  more  and  more  centralisation. 
And  freedom  will  never  be  attained  by  the  suppres- 
sion of  freedom.  It  may  be  suppressed  at  first  in 
the  interest  of  the  proletariat :  it  will  end  in  being 
suppressed  in  the  interest  of  the  Government. 

The  French  Syndicalist,  Hubert  Lagardelle,  hit 
on  the  inherent  weakness  of  the  Marxist  method  of 
transition  in  his  discussion  with  Jules  Guesde  at  the 
Socialist  Congress  at  Nancy  in  1907.  The  dictator- 
ship of  the  proletariat,  he  said,  was  as  Utopian  as 
the  Reformist  method,  for  both  attributed  to  the 
coercive  powers  of  the  State  a  creative  value  that 
they  did  not  possess.  That  is  so.  Force  may  some- 
times be  necessary,  but  its  results  can  never  be  more 
than  negative.  It  can  destroy — and  it  is  some- 


DICTATORSHIP  OF  THE  PROLETARIAT    79 

times  necessary  to  destroy — but  it  cannot  construct. 
The  dictatorship  of  the  proletariat  could,  no  doubt, 
"  sweep  away  by  force  the  old  conditions  of  pro- 
duction," but  it  could  do  no  more.  As  Lagardelle 
said,  by  whatever  method  political  power  were 
conquered,  a  Socialist  society  would  not  issue 
ready-made  either  from  an  electoral  victory  or  a 
revolution.  It  would  certainly  not  issue  ready- 
made  from  the  dictatorship  of  the  proletariat,  even 
when  the  old  conditions  of  production  had  been 
destroyed.  ArTd  how  could  a  system  of  centralised 
State  Socialism,  which  necessarily  involves  a 
strong,  if  not  despotic,  government,  build  up  "an 
association  in  which  the  free  development  of  each  is 
the  condition  for  the  free  development  of  all  "  ? 
One  might  as  well  hope  to  gather  grapes  from  thorns 
or  figs  from  thistles. 

We  are  not  restricted  to  speculation  about  the 
matter,  for  we  have  in  Russia  an  example  of  the 
dictatorship  of  the  proletariat  in  practice.  It  will 
be  said  that  the  Russian  system  is  not  a  dictatorship 
of  the  proletariat  in  the  Marxist  sense  of  the  term, 
but  a  dictatorship  of  the  Communist  party  over  the 
proletariat.  That  is  true  now,  but  it  was  not  true 
to  begin  with.  And  I  am  disposed  to  think  that 
the  way  in  which  the  dictatorship  of  the  proletariat 
has  developed  in  Russia  is  the  way  in  which  it 
must  inevitably  develop  everywhere.  It  shows  that 
Lagardelle  was  right — that  it  is  an  error  to  attribute 
a  creative  value  to  the  coercive  powers  of  the  State, 
and  a  delusion  to  imagine  that  the  State  can  be  used 
to  destroy  the  State.  If  we  begin  with  centralisa- 


80    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

tion,  we  shall  go  on  to  more  and  more  centralisation^ 
If  we  begin  by  restricting  personal  liberty,  we  shall 
go  on  to  restrict  it  more  and  more.     If  we  begin  by  I 
refusing  to  speak  of  freedom,  it  will  never  become* 
possible  to  speak  of  it.     If  we  begin  with  the  State,  I 
we  shall  never  get  beyond  the  State.     If  we  begin  \ 
with  a  dictatorship  of  the  proletariat,  we  shall  end 
with    a    dictatorship    over    the    proletariat.     The 
evolution  of  the  dictatorship  of  the  proletariat  in 
Russia  has  been  a  logical  and  natural  evolution. 
The  Marxist  theory  that  a  free  Socialist  society  can 
be  evolved  out  of  a  centralised  system  of  State 
Socialism  is  about  as  reasonable  as  would  be  the 
expectation  that  a  caterpillar  could  develop  into  a 
frog  or  a  tadpole  into  a  butterfly. 

After  the  second  Russian  revolution  the  Bol- 
sheviks proceeded  rigorously  to  apply  all  the  prin- 
ciples of  elementary  Marxism — the  Marxism  of 
the  Communist  Manifesto.  Obviously  a  collective 
dictatorship  cannot  be  directly  exercised  by  the 
proletariat,  which,  like  the  present  ruling  class, 
can  rule  only  through  representatives.  Marx  and 
Engels  contemplated  a  democratic  system,  at 
least  within  the  proletariat  itself.  The  Bolsheviks 
began  by  establishing  one.  For  nothing  could  be 
more  democratic  than  the  Soviet  system,  about 
which  so  much  nonsense  has  been  talked,  and  which 
has  been  made  a  fetish  by  some  and  a  bogy  by 
others.  It  resembled  the  system  of  the  Paris 
Commune.  "  The  Commune,"  said  Marx,  "  was  to  / 
be,  not  a  Parliament,  but  a  working  body,  legislating  / 
and  executing  at  the  same  time.  .  .  .  Universal 


DICTATORSHIP  OF  THE  PROLETARIAT    81 

suffrage  was  to  be  the  means  whereby  the  people, 
organised  in  Communes,  was  to  seek  out,  for  its 
gigantic  business,  workers,  foremen,  book-keepers, 
just  in  the  same  way  in  which  employers  use  their 
individual  suffrage."  Marx's  approval  of  this 
system  suggests,  as  I  have  said,  that  he  did  not 
object  to  geographical  decentralisation,  for  the 
system  of  the  Paris  Commune  was  essentially 
decentralising  geographically.  But  it  concentrated 
all  power  in  the  hands  of  the  "  working  body," 
which  was  to  be  at  once  legislative  and  executive, 
and  to  have  the  control  and  management  of  industry, 
in  addition  to  the  enormous  powers  already  possessed 
by  Parliaments.  It  would  be  difficult  to  imagine  a 
more  cumbersome  or  unworkable  system  than  that 
of  the  appointment  of  foremen  and  book-keepers 
by  an  assembly  already  overloaded  by  unlimited 
and  universal  powers. 

This  was  the  system  at  first  adopted  in  Russia, 
except  that  the  suffrage  was  occupational  instead 
of  being  merely  residential.  There  is  nothing 
essentially  Socialist  in  such  a  system,  which  was 
proposed  before  the  War  by  the  French  Regionalists 
for  their  suggested  regional  assemblies,  which  were 
to  be  elected  by  categories  of  electors,  grouped 
according  to  their  occupation,  with  an  extra  group 
composed  of  those  that  had  no  occupation  or  did 
not  come  within  either  of  the  categories.  The 
desirability  of  such  a  system  is  matter  for  discussion, 
but  there  can  be  no  question  that  it  is  democratic. 
The  Soviet  system  is,  like  that  of  the  Commune, 
a  federal  one  and  has,  therefore,  the  advantage  of 

F 


82    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

limiting  direct  election  to  small  areas  where  the 
electors  can  be  in  close  touch  with  their  representa- 
tives. This  was  particularly  desirable  in  Russia, 
since  it  enabled  the  peasants,  who  would  be  helpless 
if  they  were  called  upon  to  vote  in  large  constitu- 
encies on  questions  that  they  could  not  understand 
and  for  candidates  of  whom  they  knew  nothing,  to 
choose  men  whom  they  knew  and  trusted.  The 
exclusion  of  the  bourgeoisie  from  the  franchise  did 
not  make  the  system  undemocratic  so  far  as  the 
workmen  and  peasants  were  concerned.  The  towns 
were  and  are,  I  understand,  given  a  larger  representa- 
tion in  proportion  to  their  numbers  than  the  rural 
districts.  That  is,  no  doubt,  an  infringement  of 
democratic  principles,  but  it  is  a  sensible  arrange- 
ment in  a  country  where  the  rural  districts  are  still 
in  a  state  of  barbarism  or  semi-barbarism,  People 
barely  emerging  from  barbarism  are  no  more  fit  for 
democracy  than  is  the  nursery.  In  a  country  where 
80  per  cent,  of  the  inhabitants  are  illiterate  and 
very  ignorant  peasants,  it  would  be  disastrous  to 
allow  them  to  swamp  urban  civilisation.  It  was  a 
wise  course  to  give  them  votes,  so  that  they  might 
learn  to  use  them  and  their  interests  might  be 
represented,  but  so  to  arrange  matters  that  the 
urban  vote  predominated. 

The  Russian  dictatorship  of  the  proletariat  was, 
therefore,  organised  on  Marxist  lines.  It  gave  "  all 
power  to  the  Soviets,"  which  were,  theoretically  at 
least,  as  omnipotent  and  universally  competent  as 
the  Paris  Commune.  The  Trade  Unions,  which  are 

the  natural  organisations  to  be  entrusted  with  the 

• 
i 


DICTATORSHIP  OF  THE  PROLETARIAT    83 

control  of  production,  were  subordinated  to  the 
Soviets,  that  is,  to  political  bodies.  Naturally, 
the  system  broke  down.  The  power  became 
gradually  concentrated  in  the  central  or  national 
Soviet,  and  then  by  a  natural  transition  in  the 
Government  and  the  Communist  party,  and  the 
Trade  Unions  were  reduced  to  impotence. 

In  a  letter  addressed  to  Trade  Unionists,  the 
Communist  party  said  :  "  The  Communist  party 
cannot,  in  any  case,  accept  the  idea  that  the  party 
should  have  only  the  political  control  and  that  the 
economic  control  should  be  in  the  hands  of  the  Trade 
Unions.  This  is  an  echo  of  the  Second  Interna- 
tional." The  Communist  party  has  become  an 
army  of  bureaucrats — a  new  aristocracy,  to  which 
the  proletariat  is  completely  subordinated.  Accord- 
ing to  the  last  statistical  report  of  the  party,  of  its 
604,000  members,  318,000  (53  per  cent.)  are  State 
or  municipal  officials,  162,000  attached  to  the  army 
in  some  capacity,  36,000  officials  of  the  party, 
12,OOOTrade  Union  officials,  6000  State  or  municipal 
minor  employees,  and  only  70,000  (11  per  cent.) 
are  workmen.  It  is  quite  clear  who  now  form  the 
ruling  class  in  Russia. 

Soviet  control  of  production  no  longer  exists 
even  nominally.  The  factories  are  under  the 
despotic  control  of  the  Government,  which  appoints 
for  each  a  single  manager  armed  with  more  arbi- 
trary power  than  any  capitalist  employer.  The 
workmen  are  under  military  discipline  and  strikes 
are  illegal.  If  they  venture  to  take  concerted 
action  to  improve  their  conditions  or  recover  their 


84    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

liberty,  the  Government  calls  out  the  army  to 
repress  them,  just  as  the  Tsar's  Government  did. 
There  has  been  more  than  one  rising  and  each  has 
been  ruthlessly  suppressed.  The  press  is  a  State 
monopoly,  so  that  nothing  can  be  published  without 
the  permission  of  the  Government.  Little  if  any 
criticism  or  expression  of  opinion  hostile  to  the 
Government  is  tolerated  and  no  public  meeting  of 
protest  is  allowed.  The  dictatorship  of  the  pro- 
letariat has  become  a  dictatorship  over  the  prole- 
tarians of  an  oligarchy  claiming  to  represent  a 
mythicised  and  personified  Proletariat,  just  as 
other  despotic  authorities  claim  to  be  the  repre- 
sentatives of  God  on  earth.  In  fact,  the  tadpole 
has  become  a  frog,  not  as  Marx  and  Engels  seem  to 
have  expected,  a  butterfly. 

The  free  Socialist  society  recedes  further  and 
further  into  -the  distance.  When  Mr  Bertrand 
Russell  was  in  Russia,  Lenin  expressed  the  opinion 
that  the  transition  stage — the  dictatorship — would 
probably  last  twenty  years.  In  December  1920 
he  told  the  Spanish  Socialist  delegates  to  Moscow 
that  it  might  last  forty  or  fifty  years,  and,  when  the 
delegates  suggested  that  the  granting  of  concessions 
to  foreign  capitalists  might  prolong  it  still  more, 
he  assented.  But,  he  said,  the  concessions  were 
nevertheless  necessary,  for  the  Russians  could  not 
go  on  suffering  as  they  had  done  for  the  last  three 
years  and  the  world  revolution  was  long  in  coming. 
Ardent  advocates  of  the  dictatorship  of  the  prole- 
tariat in  Western  countries  seem  to  imagine  that  it 
is  a  short  cut  to  Socialism  or  Communism,  and 


DICTATORSHIP  OF  THE  PROLETARIAT    85 

accuse  those  of  us  that  prefer  the  main  road  of 
liberty,  of  wishing  to  postpone  the  advent  of 
Socialism.  If  the  short  cut  is  going  to  take  half 
a  century  or  more,  I  prefer  to  stick  to  the  main 
road.  But  no  such  regime  as  that  now  existing  in 
Russia  can  possibly  last  half  a  century.  Lenin's 
declaration  to  the  Spanish  Socialist  delegates  is, 
in  fact,  a  confession  that  the  dictatorship  of  the 
proletariat  has  failed. 

It  is  only  just  to  say  that  its  failure  must  to 
some  extent  be  attributed  to  the  peculiar  conditions 
of  Russia.  The  Russian  experiment  has  been  made 
in  a  country  where  the  conditions  would  have  been 
considered  by  Marx  most  unsuitable.  For  Russia 
in  1917  was  hardly  more  advanced  than  France  in 
1789  and  the  Russian  Communists  have  attempted 
to  pass  directly  from  a  semi-feudal  society  to  a 
Communist  one.  The  Russian  experiment  cannot, 
therefore,  be  regarded  as  an  experiment  in  what 
Marx  would  have  considered  normal  conditions. 
Moreover,  the  Russian  Communists  went  further 
at  once  than  Marx  and  Engels  thought  it  possible 
in  1848  to  go  even  in  the  most  advanced  countries. 
Among  the  immediate  measures  proposed  by  the 
Communist  Manifesto  in  the  most  advanced  coun- 
tries after  the  conquest  of  political  power  by  the 
proletariat  were  a  heavy  progressive  income  tax 
and  the  abolition  of  all  right  of  inheritance.  Such 
proposals  imply  the  gradual,  not  the  immediate, 
suppression  of  private  property  in  the  means  of 
production. 

Conditions   have   changed    since    1848    and   the 


86    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

programme  of  the  Communist  Manifesto  is  out  of 
date  for  advanced  countries  in  1921,  but  Russia  in 
1917  was  less  advanced  than  the  most  advanced 
countries  in  1848.  It  would  have  been  wiser  in 
Russia  to  have  followed  the  advice  of  the  Communist 
Manifesto  in  this  regard,  instead  of  attempting 
at  once  to  expropriate  all  private  capital.  The 
revolution  would  then  have  had  a  powerful  weapon 
against  counter-revolutionaries  and  emigres,  whose 
private  property  of  every  kind  it  could  have  con- 
fiscated, in  accordance  with  another  recommenda- 
tion of  the  Communist  Manifesto.  The  fear  of 
confiscation  would  have  acted  as  a  strong  deterrent. 
This  was  not  the  only  example  of  the  error  of 
trying  to  do  too  much  at  once.  The  experience  of 
Russia  has  shown  that  one  of  the  greatest  dangers 
that  will  menace  Socialism  in  its  cradle  is  that  of 
diminished  production.  Lenin  himself  has  warned 
the  workers  in  other  countries  against  the  policy  of 
discouraging  production  in  capitalist  conditions, 
lest  it  should  promote  a  habit  that  will  be  dangerous 
to  the  social  revolution  in  the  future.  It  appears 
that  the  Russian  workmen  innocently  imagined 
that,  since  they  had  taken  the  place  of  the  bourgeois, 
they  could  imitate  the  bourgeois  and  cease  to  work. 
The  more  civilised  and  instructed  workers  of  a 
great  industrial  country  are  unlikely  to  be  so  nai'f, 
but  nobody  can  foresee  the  psychological  effects 
of  social  upheaval  and  it  is  essential  that  the 
economic  incentive  to  production  should  be  as 
strong  as  possible  in  the  early  days  of  a  Socialist 
society.  In  Russia  it  was  entirely  removed  by 


DICTATORSHIP  OF  THE  PROLETARIAT    87 

the  immediate  institution  of  equal  salaries  for  all 
workers  of  every  category  and  grade.  The  conse- 
quence, as  might  have  been  expected,  was  the  break- 
down of  production.  The  non-manual  workers 
refused  to  work  at  all  and  the  manual  workers  did 
as  little  work  as  possible.  This  system  had  to 
be  abandoned  for  an  elaborate  scale  of  wages, 
differing  according  to  the  nature  of  the  work  and 
the  grade  of  the  worker. 

The  effect  of  the  change  on  production  was,  how- 
ever, inadequate  and  the  Government  resorted  to 
industrial  conscription.  The  result  of  the  experi- 
ment has  fully  justified  the  objections  of  liber- 
tarians to  forced  labour.  Its  supporters  are  fond 
of  saying  that  most  people  are  already  forced  to 
work  by  economic  pressure,  while  a  small  minority 
escape  from  the  obligation,  and  that  it  would  be 
more  just  to  force  everybody  to  work  by  law.  It  is 
because  the  obligation  to  work  is  a  natural  one  that 
legal  coercion  is  unnecessary.  The  reason  why  a 
minority  escape  at  present  from  the  natural  obliga- 
tion is  that  the  capitalist  system  enables  them  to 
live  on  the  labour  of  others.  When  that  privilege 
has  been  abolished,  the  natural  obligation  to  work 
will  become  universal  and  no  further  coercion  will  be 
required.  If,  in  a  society  where  the  conditions  are 
such  that  everybody  is  free  to  work — as  is  not  the 
case  at  present — there  are  able-bodied  persons  that 
obstinately  refuse  to  work,  they  must  take  the 
natural  consequences  and  starve,  unless  public 
opinion  prefers  to  treat  them  as  other  abnormal 
people  are  treated.  But,  although  there  might  be 


88    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

such  persons  at  first,  they  would  probably  cease  to 
exist  or  become  extremely  rare  after  two  or  three 
generations  of  a  Socialist  society. 

There  is  a  psychological  error  at  the  root  of  the 
arguments  for  industrial  conscription,  which  means 
much  more  than  a  mere  legal  obligation  to  do  some 
work  of  some  kind.  It  means  that  all  workers  are 
under  military  discipline ;  that  some  person  or 
persons  have  the  power  to  force  them  to  do  some 
particular  kind  of  work  and  to  transfer  them  from 
one  job  to  another  without  their  consent.  Russian 
workmen,  until  the  conditions  of  industrial  con- 
scription were  relaxed  early  in  1921,  were  bound 
to  live  in  a  particular  place  like  mediaeval  serfs. 
It  is  all  very  well  to  say  that  the  workers  have 
very  little  choice  now.  It  is  true  that  the  choice 
is  very  limited,  but  there  is  a  certain  choice  in 
certain  conditions.  If  labour  is  scarce,  the  choice 
is  considerable  and  a  good  workman  can  choose 
his  job  within  the  limits  of  his  capacities.  But, 
whether  the  choice  be  more  or  less,  there  is 
always  at  least  a  semblance  of  liberty.  Industrial 
conscription  would  remove  even  the  semblance. 
People  that  do  not  understand  what  a  differ- 
ence that  would  make  have  no  psychological 
perception. 

Forced  labour  never  has  been  and  never  will  be  so 
productive  as  even  apparently  free  labour.  Actual 
slave-labour  compensated  for  inadequate  produc- 
tion by  its  cheapness,  for  when  once  the  slave  had 
been  bought,  he  cost  nothing  but  his  bare  keep 
and  it  did  not  matter  if  it  took  two  or  even  three 


DICTATORSHIP  OF  THE  PROLETARIAT    89 

slaves  to  do  the  work  of  one  free  man.  Socialism 
can  hardly  be  based  on  cheap  labour  ;  that 
being  so,  industrial  conscription  will  always  be 
disastrous  to  Socialism.  Some  Socialists,  who  are 
opposed  to  industrial  conscription  as  a  permanent 
institution,  believe  that  it  will  be  necessary  during 
the  transition  period  to  prevent  diminished  pro- 
duction. The  experience  of  Russia  shows  that 
they  are  mistaken.  The  only  safeguard  against 
diminished  production  is  the  maintenance  of  the 
economic  incentive.  That  has  now  been  recognised 
in  Russia  by  a  system  of  bonuses  to  workmen  and 
the  introduction  of  piecework  wherever  possible. 

Much  hitherto  unpublished  information  about 
Russian  economic  conditions  since  the  revolution 
is  given  by  E.  Colombino  in  his  valuable  book, 
Tre  Mesi  nella  Russia  dei  Soviet,*  which  differs 
from  most  of  the  books  about  Soviet  Russia  in  that 
it  consists  mainly  of  facts,  not  of  opinions.  Signor 
Colombino,  who  is  a  metal  worker,  was  one  of  the 
delegates  of  the  Italian  Socialist  Party  to  the 
Second  Congress  of  the  Third  International  in  July 
1920  and  spent  three  months  in  Russia.  A  com- 
parison of  the  present  production  in  Russia  as  a 
whole  with  that  before  the  War  would,  of  course, 
be  misleading  as  a  criterion  of  the  results  of  the 
existing  regime.  In  the  first  place  the  territory  of 
Soviet  Russia  is  smaller  than  that  of  the  old  Russian 
Empire  and  some  of  the  present  border  States 
provided  a  large  proportion  of  certain  raw  materials 
and  other  products.  For  example,  the  production 
*  Published  by  Avanti,  16  Via  San  Damiauo,  Milan. 


90    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

of  naphtha  fell  from  570,000,000  poods  in  1912  to 
71,000,000  in  1920  ;  that  of  coal  during  the  same 
period  from  1,000,000,000  poods  to  431,744,000  ; 
that  of  sugar  from  108,746,100  poods  in  1914  to 
7,500,000  in  1920  ;  that  of  gold  from  2950  poods  in 
1911  to  95  poods  in  1920.  Before  one  could  say 
what  proportion  of  this  appalling  diminution  is  due 
to  the  present  regime,  one  would  have  to  know 
from  what  districts  of  old  Russia  the  naphtha,  the 
coal,  the  gold  and  the  beet  for  making  sugar 
principally  came.  Again,  one  important  cause  of 
diminished  production  in  manufactured  articles  is 
the  lack  of  raw  materials,  due  to  the  infamous 
blockade  of  Russia  by  the  Western  Powers.  Further, 
it  has  to  be  remembered  that  Russia  has  ever 
since  the  revolution  been  at  war  and  that  a  large 
proportion  of  her  best  workers  have  been  taken  by 
the  army. 

It  would,  therefore,  be  unjust  to  attribute  the 
whole  of  the  diminution  in  Russian  production,  or 
even  perhaps  the  greater  part  of  it,  to  industrial 
conscription  or  the  Bolshevik  regime.  But,  when  all 
allowances  have  been  made,  it  is  clear  that  indus- 
trial conscription  has  been  a  failure.  Nothing  shows 
that  more  clearly  than  the  difference  between  the 
estimates  and  the  actual  production.  For  the 
estimates  are,  of  course,  based  on  the  known 
resources  and  take  into  account  the  lack  of  certain 
raw  materials  and  the  withdrawal  of  men  from 
production  to  the  army.  In  hardly  a  single  case 
did  the  production  in  1920,  according  to  the  official 
figures  given  in  the  Ekonomicheskaya  Zhizn  of 


DICTATORSHIP  OF  THE  PROLETARIAT    91 

21st  December  1920,  come  near  the  estimates. 
Thus,  the  estimated  production  of  sugar  was 
9,000,000  poods  and  the  actual  production?, 500,000. 
The  estimated  production  of  gold  was  365  poods  and 
the  actual  production  95.  The  estimates  for  1921 
were  enormously  in  excess  of  the  production  for 
1920 — in  many  cases  three,  four  or  five  times  as 
much — and  it  may  be  assumed  with  something  like 
certainty  that  they  will  not  be  realised  or  anything 
like  it. 

In  the  fourteen  model  "  shock  "  factories  in  the 
metal  industry,  working  for  transport,  the  output 
of  only  three  articles  in  the  second  six  months  of 
1920  equalled  or  exceeded  the  estimates,  namely, 
narrow-gauge  locomotives,  of  which  19  were  esti- 
mated and  produced  ;  wagons  and  trucks,  of  which 
the  estimate  was  190  and  the  output  202  ;  snow- 
ploughs,  of  which  108  were  produced,  the  estimate 
having  been  90.  In  the  case  of  eleven  other 
articles  production  was  50  per  cent,  of  the  estimate, 
or  more,  up  to  90  per  cent,  in  one  case.  The  pro- 
duction of  the  remaining  five  articles  mentioned 
was  respectively,  44-7,  36,  35,  19-6  and  10-5  per 
cent,  of  the  estimates.  The  production  of  paper  in 
1919  was  69  per  cent,  of  the  estimates  ;  that  of 
wood  pulp  65  per  cent.  ;  that  of  cellulose  69  per 
cent.  In  the  seven  large  india-rubber  factories, 
where  30,000  workers  were  employed  at  the  time  of 
the  Bolshevik  revolution,  there  are  now  only  6000 
workers,  whose  production  is  50  per  cent,  of  the 
normal  ;  the  supplies  of  raw  material  in  this  in- 
dustry, Signor  Colombino  says,  are  plentiful. 


92    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

Diminution  of  individual  production  seems  to  be 
general.  For  instance,  at  Briansk,  in  Orel,  the 
number  of  workers  has  been  reduced  from  20,000 
to  from  13,000  to  15,000,  but  the  output  has 
diminished  75  per  cent.  One  of  the  causes  of  this 
is,  of  course,  the  terribly  inadequate  nourishment 
of  the  workers.  But  that  is  to  a  great  extent  the 
result  of  the  hostility  of  the  peasants  to  the  present 
regime,  which  might  perhaps  have  been  avoided  by 
a  wiser  policy.  The  facts  given  by  Signor  Colom- 
bino  lead  to  the  conclusion  that  things  are  going 
from  bad  to  worse.  In  Moscow,  for  instance,  there 
were  644  factories  working  in  1913  ;  136  in  1918 
and  only  91  in  1919.  The  population  of  Moscow 
decreased  between  1917  and  1920  by  44*5  per  cent., 
and  that  of  Petrograd  71  per  cent.  The  urban 
population  generally  decreased  by  about  30  per 
cent.,  except  in  Siberia,  where  it  increased,  owing, 
no  doubt,  to  immigration  from  the  rest  of  Russia, 

Signor  Colombino's  book  should  be  read  in  order 
that  the  terrible  economic  condition  of  Russia  may 
be  fully  appreciated.  As  I  have  said,  there  are 
many  causes  of  it,  but  among  them  must  be 
included  the  rigorous  application  of  dogmatic 
principles  without  regard  to  existing  conditions  and 
the  attempt  to  establish  all  at  once  a  Communist 
society  in  a  country  that  had  not  reached  a  stage 
of  economic  development  in  which  such  a  society 
is  possible.  It  would  have  been  better  to  follow 
less  closely  the  maxims  of  Marx  and  adhere  more 
closely  to  his  scientific  and — in  the  literal  and  non- 
pejorative  sense  of  the  term — opportunist  spirit. 


DICTATORSHIP  OF  THE  PROLETARIAT    93 

In  my  opinion,  the  Bolsheviks  were  right  in 
repudiating  the  National  Debt.  That  is  one  of  the 
first  steps  that  Socialists  should  take  in  any  country 
if  and  when  they  get  into  power,  and  there  was  a 
special  reason  for  it  in  Russia.  In  1905,  when  the 
Anglo-French  Loan  saved  the  Tsardom  and  stifled 
the  revolution,  the  Russian  revolutionaries  publicly 
declared  that,  if  and  when  they  came  into  power, 
they  would  not  acknowledge  the  debts  of  the 
Tsar's  Government.  They  were  right  to  keep  their 
word.  But  they  were  unwise  in  repudiating  the 
debt  without  exceptions.  I  believe  that,  at  first, 
an  exception  was  made  in  the  case  of  Russians 
holding  less  than  a  certain  amount.  That  exception 
should  have  been  extended  to  small  foreign  bond- 
holders. I  urged  this  policy  at  the  time  on  a 
Russian  friend  of  mine  in  touch  with  the  Soviet 
Government,  who  said  that  he  would  transmit  the 
opinion  as  that  of  a  person  with  a  certain  knowledge 
of  France.  The  consequences  of  the  policy  actually 
adopted  were  what  I  feared  they  would  be.  The 
whole  French  petite  bourgeoisie  and  peasantry 
were  made  violently  hostile  to  the  Russian  revolu- 
tion and  their  hostility  probably  made  French 
intervention  against  Russia  possible.  It  is  essential 
that  Socialists  in  all  *  countries  should  conciliate 
the  small  bourgeois  and  peasant  proprietors,  who 
are  now  among  their  most  bitter  enemies.  Kautsky 
was  quite  right  in  saying  that  "  a  home  worker  or 
a  small  master  with  one  single  journeyman " 
should  have  been  excepted  in  Russia  from  the 
disfranchisement  of  the  bourgeoisie.  Marx  may 


94    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

have  been  equally  right  in  saying  that  small  masters 
are  the  most  unscrupulous  exploiters  of  hired 
labour.  But  it  is  a  question  of  expediency.  It  is 
good  policy  to  buy  these  people's  support,  parti- 
cularly in  countries  where  the  industrial  proletariat 
is  in  a  minority.  In  France,  for  example,  Socialism 
will  never  be  possible  until  the  peasant  proprietors 
have  been  squared. 

The  Bolsheviks  saw  the  necessity  of  squaring 
the  peasants,  but  they  set  about  it  in  the  wrong 
way.  Their  agrarian  policy  has  perhaps  been  their 
greatest  blunder.  They  should  simply  have  collected 
the  economic  rent  from  the  land-owners.  That 
would  soon  have  broken  up  the  large  estates  and 
given  land  to  all  the  peasants.  Lenin  is  very  scorn- 
ful about  the  "  renting  out  of  small  plots  to  the  poor 
peasants  "  by  the  State,  which  he  declares  to  be 
a  "  bourgeois  "  and  "  liberal  "  reform.  It  may  be  ; 
but  that  does  not  seem  to  me  to  matter,  if  it  is  a 
desirable  and  workable  system.  In  a  country  like 
Russia,  where  small  production  in  agriculture 
must  continue  for  a  long  time  to  come,  it  was  the 
obvious  system.  In  Russia,  before  the  revolution, 
the  majority  of  the  peasants  were  proletarian  or 
semi-proletarian.  The  small  peasants  who  had  little 
or  no  land  would  have  been  delighted  to  pay  rent 
to  the  State  for  it,  as  a  condition  of  obtaining  it : 
after  all,  it  would  have  been  a  form  of  taxation.  The 
better-off  peasants  would  have  been  glad  enough  to 
pay  rent  for  their  land  rather  than  be  deprived  of  it. 
All  the  peasants  would  have  been  conciliated, 
whereas  they  have  all  been  estranged. 


DICTATORSHIP  OF  THE  PROLETARIAT    95 

What  the  Bolsheviks  did  was  at  once  to  abolish 
private  property  in  land — on  paper — in  the  hope  of 
organising  Communist  production  on  a  large  scale 
under  State  control.  They  then  tried  to  win  the 
support  of  the  small  peasants  by  stirring  them  up 
against  the  well-to-do  peasants.  The  small  peasants 
were  quite  willing  to  seize  the  land — the  operation 
was  sometimes  accompanied  by  jacqueries  and  the 
murder  of  the  former  owners — but  they  had  not 
the  least  intention  of  allowing  it  to  be  common 
property.  Legally  the  land  belongs  to  the  State, 
not  to  the  peasants,  who  are  allowed  to  hold  it  only 
so  long  as  they  cultivate  it.  Actually,  this  is  a 
legal  fiction.  The  peasants  have  got  the  land  and 
they  intend  to  stick  to  it.  Nothing  but  force  will 
ever  dispossess  them,  and  it  would  now  be  impossible 
to  make  them  pay  the  economic  rent.  The  attempt 
to  organise  Communist  agriculture  on  a  large  scale 
has,  naturally,  failed.  The  few  Soviet  farms 
worked  by  labourers  formerly  employed  on  the 
large  estates  hardly  count  in  Russian  agriculture. 

Although  the  Bolsheviks  have  given  the  peasants 
the  land,  they  have  not  conciliated  them.  The 
peasants  are  unwilling  to  supply  the  towns  with 
food,  because  they  can  get  nothing  in  return,  and 
they  resent  the  necessary  use  of  force  to  compel 
them.  How  strained  the  situation  is,  Lenin's 
declaration  in  December  1920  to  the  Spanish 
Socialist  delegates  showed.  He  said  that,  so  long 
as  the  peasants,  who  were  the  majority  in  Russia, 
had  not  adopted  the  Soviet  point  of  view,  the 
dictatorship  "  in  the  interest  of  the  town  workers  " 


96    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

would  be  maintained.  The  peasants,  he  added, 
hated  the  Bolsheviks,  but  they  detested  still  more 
the  Denikins  and  Koltchaks.  The  rural  population 
would  have  to  reconcile  itself  to  Bolshevism,  or 
there  would  be  civil  war.  This  confession  of 
failure  is  a  striking  contrast  to  Lenin's  assertion 
of  the  success  of  the  Bolshevik  agrarian  policy  in 
his  reply  to  Kautsky,  where  he  boasted  that  the 
peasants,  for  the  first  time  in  history,  were  in 
Russia  "  under  the  influence  of  a  proletarian  State." 
Lenin  has,  however,  wisely  abandoned  the  policy 
of  making  war  on  the  peasants  to  force  them  to 
accept  Bolshevism.  At  the  tenth  congress  of  the 
Communist  party,  held  at  Moscow  in  March  1921, 
he  announced  a  complete  change  in  the  agrarian 
policy  of  the  Bolshevik  Government.  Since,  he 
said,  "  we  have  not  succeeded  in  changing  them 
[the  peasants]  in  three  years,  we  must  adapt  our 
policy  to  theirs."  The  levies  on  agricultural 
produce  have  been  abandoned  and  a  tax  in  kind 
imposed  on  the  peasants,  who  have  the  absolute 
ownership  of  all  produce  left  over  after  payment  of 
the  tax  and  may  dispose  of  it  as  they  please.  The 
right  of  private  trading  has  been  restored  ;  it  was 
authorised  in  the  Moscow  shops  and  markets  by  an 
order  of  the  Moscow  Soviet  dated  April  6,  1921. 
The  co-operative  societies  have  been  released  fiom 
the  control  of  the  Commissariat  of  Supply  and 
their  independence  restored  to  them.  By  the 
Decree  of  April  7,  1921,  co-operative  organisations 
are  even  allowed  to  open  works  and  factories,  so 
the  State  monopoly  of  industry  has  gone.  The 


DICTATORSHIP  OF  THE  PROLETARIAT    97 

Bolsheviks  have,  in  fact,  been  obliged  to  throw  their 
Communist  principles  to  the  winds  to  save  their 
power.  The  change  of  policy,  in  the  words  of 
Lenin  himself,  "  implies  a  return  to  capitalism." 
Had  the  Bolsheviks  been  more  opportunist  to 
begin  with,  they  would  have  avoided  this  complete 
surrender.  There  is  a  grave  danger  that  Russia  may 
become  a  backward  peasant  Republic,  and  that 
would  be  a  disaster.  It  would  be  the  triumph  of 
barbarism  over  the  only  effective  civilising  force  in 
Russia. 

The  development  of  the  Russian  revolution  has 
closely  resembled  that  of  the  French.  In  both 
cases  foreign  intervention  has  been  an  important 
factor.  No  doubt  the  temper  of  the  Russian 
Communist  leaders  is  authoritarian  and  fanatical. 
They  are  tyrants  because  they  have  been  martyrs. 
It  would  be  too  much  to  ask  of  men  that  have  been 
tracked  and  hunted,  have  been  sent  to  Siberian 
prisons,  have  suffered  years  of  exile  and  poverty 
for  their  convictions,  that  they  should  be  tolerant 
when  they  get  the  upper  hand.  It  is  not  surprising 
that,  as  Lenin  said  to  the  Spanish  Socialist  dele- 
gates, the  Bolsheviks  "  have  never  talked  of 
liberty."  Like  the  early  Christians,  now  that  they 
are  no  longer  persecuted  but  are  in  a  position  to 
persecute,  they  make  the  most  of  their  opportunity. 
But  this  temper  does  not  make  for  sound  judgment 
or  cool  reasoning.  Hatred,  like  any  other  passion, 
falsifies  the  judgment  and  obscures  the  reason. 
Some  of  the  measures  taken  by  the  Russian  Com- 
munists suggest  that  their  hatred  of  the  bourgeois, 

G 


98    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

even  as  individuals,  is  stronger  than  their  love  of 
the  proletariat  collectively.  Nevertheless,  it  may 
be  doubted  whether  the  present  despotism  would 
have  been  possible  even  in  Russia,  but  for  foreign 
intervention.  For  it  is  the  militarisation  of  the 
country  that  has  made  it  possible  and  it  is  doubtful 
whether  the  war-weary  Russian  people  would  have 
submitted  to  military  conscription,  had  not  the 
national  sentiment  been  aroused  by  foreign  support 
of  the  various  counter-revolutionary  adventurers. 
The  Governments  of  England,  France  and  the 
United  States  have,  therefore,  a  great  responsi- 
bility for  the  present  despotism  in  Russia.  Again 
the  history  of  the  French  Revolution  repeats 
itself. 

When  Mr  Bertrand  Russell  visited  Russia,  his 
opinion  was  that  the  revolution  had  reached  a 
stage  answering  to  the  French  Directoire.  It  has 
now  got  beyond  that.  The  "  dictatorship  in  the 
interest  of  the  town  workers "  is  a  true  form 
of  Bonapartist  pseudo-democracy.  The  Russian 
Government  claims  to  be  the  interpreter  of  the 
"  real  will  "  of  the  proletariat — not,  that  is,  of  what 
the  proletariat  actually  wants,  but  of  what  it 
would  want,  if  it  were  more  enlightened.  The 
Soviets,  deprived  of  all  real  power,  occupy  in  the 
Russian  system  the  place  of  the  docile  Parliaments 
of  Napoleon  I.  and  Napoleon  III.  The  Russian 
Government,  like  the  Napoleons,  legislates  by 
decree.  The  Russian  elections,  as  in  France 
under  the  First  and  Second  Empires,  are  manipu- 
lated by  the  Government  so  as  to  secure  a  per- 


DICTATORSHIP  OF  THE  PROLETARIAT    99 

manent  majority.  No  doubt  the  men  at  the  head 
of  the  Russian  State  machine  are  sincere  and  dis- 
interested, but  what  will  their  successors  be,  if  the 
regime  should  last  half  a  century,  as  Lenin  anti- 
cipates ?  Men  capable  of  governing  in  such  con- 
ditions without  being  demoralised  do  not  exist.  It 
would  be  unsafe  to  trust  an  angel  from  heaven  with 
such  powers.  Already  there  are  symptoms  that 
the  present  rulers  of  Russia  are  being  demoralised 
by  arbitrary  power  and  are,  unconsciously,  begin- 
ning to  like  power  for  its  own  sake.  Were  it  other- 
wise they  would  not  be  human.  Robespierre,  the 
most  sincere  and  disinterested  of  men,  was  demoral- 
ised by  arbitrary  power  and  ruined  the  French 
Revolution  by  continuing  the  Terror  too  long. 
The  Bolsheviks  seem  likely  to  follow  his  example. 
As  for  their  agents,  it  must  be  only  too  evident 
that  a  privileged  oligarchy,  like  the  Russian  Com- 
munist party,  will  attract  every  ambitious  and 
capable  arriviste. 

It  seems  to  me,  then,  that  the  results  of  the 
Russian  experiment  in  the  dictatorship  of  the 
proletariat  hardly  justify  the  elevation  of  that 
Marxist  hypothesis  into  a  fetish,  or  even  into  the 
fundamental  dogma  of  Socialism.  I  repeat  that  the 
Russian  experiment  has  been  made  in  conditions 
that,  on  Marxist  principles,  were  not  normal. 
But,  although  everything  that  has  happened  in 
Russia  would  not  happen  in  every  country,  I  am 
convinced  that  the  dictatorship  of  the  proletariat 
would  develop  everywhere  on  the  same  general 
lines.  For  like  produces  like  and  a  system  of 


100    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

authority  and  repression  can  never  produce  a 
society  of  free  men.  The  use  of  force,  if  the  circum- 
stances make  it  unavoidable,  is  not  the  same  thing 
as  the  exercise  of  authority,  although  both  Engels 
and  Lenin  have  confused  the  two.  "  If,"  said 
Engels,  "  the  Paris  Commune  had  not  based  itself 
on  the  authority  of  the  armed  people  against  the 
bourgeoisie,  would  it  have  maintained  itself  more 
than  twenty-four  hours  ?  "  Armed  force  is  not 
authority  and  may  be  the  negation  of  authority. 
It  is  one  thing  for  the  proletariat  to  use  force  in 
self-defence  :  it  is  quite  another  for  it  to  "  organise 
itself  as  the  ruling  class."  The  latter  course  is  an 
exercise  of  authority,  the  former  is  not.  We  can- 
not destroy  the  State  by  means  of  the  State,  or 
authority  by  means  of  authority,  or  militarism  by 
means  of  militarism.  If  we  desire  "  an  association 
in  which  the  free  development  of  each  is  the  con- 
dition for  the  free  development  of  all,"  we  must 
begin  by  laying  the  foundations  of  such  an  associa- 
tion, not  of  its  exact  opposite.  And  the  beginning 
must  be  made,  not  after  the  social  revolution,  but 
before  it. 


CHAPTER  VII. 

REVOLUTIONARY  SYNDICALISM. 

ALTHOUGH  Marxist  Socialism  influenced  revolu- 
tionary opinion  in  France,  the  pure  Marxist  theory 
never  gained  so  strong  a  hold  there  as  in  some  other 
countries.  The  "  parti  ouvrier,"  founded  by  Jules 
Guesde  and  Paul  Lafargue,  which  was  strictly 
Marxist,  was  never  so  large  as  the  "  Possibilist " 
Socialist  Party,  of  which  Jaures  was  the  leader, 
with  which  it  was  united  in  1905.  French  revolu- 
tionary opinion  was  traditionally  libertarian  and 
the  influence  of  Proudhon  and  Bakunin  held  its  own 
against  that  of  Marx.  It  was  also  to  a  great  extent 
anti-parliamentarist  and  opposed  to  all  political 
action.  These  tendencies  separated  many  French 
revolutionaries  from  the  Reformist  tendencies  of 
many  of  the  "  Possibilists  "  on  the  one  hand,  and 
on  the  other  from  what  they  considered  the 
centralising,  and  even  Statiste,  tendency  of  Marxist 
Socialism.  About  a  quarter  of  a  century  ago  a 
school  of  revolutionary  thought  developed  that 
rejected  the  conquest  of  political  power — the  dicta- 
torship of  the  proletariat — and  opposed  to  it  the 
conquest  of  economic  power,  as  the  method  of 
passing  from  a  capitalist  to  a  Socialist  society. 
Its  theory  was  based  on  the  maxim  that  "  eco- 


101 


102    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

nomic  power  precedes  political  power,"  and  on  the 
argument  that  an  economic  change  can  best  be 
effected  by  economic,  not  political,  methods. 

The  name  given  to  this  theory  was  that  of 
revolutionary  Syndicalism — from  syndicat,  the 
French  word  for  a  Trade  Union.  It  owed  much  to 
Proudhon  and  Bakunin.  Indeed,  the  famous  say- 
ing of  Proudhon  :  "  L' atelier  remplacera  le 
gouvernement "  ("  the  workshop  will  take,  the 
place  of  the  Government  ")  is  still  the  motto  of 
Syndicalism.  The  founders  of  Syndicalism  came 
from  various  quarters.  Some,  like  Pouget,  had 
been  anarchists  ;  others,  like  Griffuelhes,  Marxist 
Socialists.  Others  again  had  been  Blanquists, 
followers  of  Proudhon,  or  members  of  the  Allemane 
Group.  A  few,  like  Hubert  Lagardelle,  remained  in 
the  Socialist  Party  in  spite  of  their  adoption  of  the 
Syndicalist  theory.  But  the  great  majority  of  the 
Syndicalist  leaders  not  only  left  the  Socialist  Party 
or  remained  outside  it,  but  violently  attacked  it 
as  a  party  of  "  politicians."  The  bitter  contro- 
versies between  Socialists  and  Syndicalists  before 
the  War  weakened  and  divided  the  French  prole- 
tariat. The  federal  organisation  of  French  Trade 
Unions,  the  "  Confederation  generale  du  Travail," 
commonly  known  as  the  C.G.T.,  which  was  founded 
in  1895,  definitely  adopted  the  Syndicalist  pro- 
gramme at  its  Amiens  Congress  in  1906  and  has 
officially  adhered  to  it  ever  since.  Before  the  War 
its  official  policy  was  abstention  in  all  elections,  but 
in  fact  this  policy  was  never  generally  adopted 
and  many  Trade  Unionists  were  active  members  of 


REVOLUTIONARY  SYNDICALISM     103 

the  Socialist  Party.  Syndicalism  spread  to  Italy 
and  became  the  policy  of  the  "  Cojifederazione 
generale  del  Lavoro,"  the  Italian  equivalent  of  the 
C.G.T.  In  Italy,  however,  the  Trade  Union  organi- 
sation gradually  drew  nearer  to  the  Socialist 
Party,  with  which  it  has  now  for  some  time  been 
definitely  allied,  and  abandoned  the  Syndicalist 
theory  in  favour  of  Marxism.  But  in  fact  the 
Italian  Trade  Unionists  follow  Syndicalist  methods 
and  have  applied  them  more  consistently  than  the 
French.  At  bottom,  they  still  have  more  faith  in 
them  than  in  the  conquest  of  political  power, 
although  they  do  not  abstain  from  political 
action.  D'Aragona,  the  present  Secretary  of  the 
Italian  Confederation  of  Labour,  is  a  member  of 
the  Italian  Parliament. 

Although  Syndicalism  became  anti-Marxist,  Sorel, 
who  was  the  first  to  formulate  the  Syndicalist 
theory,  maintained  that  it  was  a  logical  deduction 
from  Marxist  conceptions,  and,  in  particular,  from 
the  economic  or  materialist  interpretation  of  history. 
In  his  L'Avenir  socialiste  des  Syndicats,  which 
passed  almost  unnoticed  at  the  time  of  its  publica- 
tion in  1898,  but  afterwards  became  famous,  he 
held  that  the  conditions  had  been  modified  by  the 
development  of  Trade  Unionism  and  that  the  con- 
quest of  political  power  was  out  of  date.  It  had 
become  evident,  in  his  opinion,  that  the  prole- 
tariat would  not  emancipate  itself  from  all  exploita- 
tion by  making  itself  the  ruling  class  instead  of  the 
bourgeoisie,  as  the  bourgeoisie  had  made  itself  the 
ruling  class  in  place  of  the  aristocracy.  When  the 


104    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

social  revolution  became  possible,  the  State  must  be 
destroyed  once  and  for  all.  Meanwhile,  the  pro- 
letariat had  two  methods  of  action  :  it  should 
combat  in  the  existing  political  organisation  to 
obtain  social  legislation  favourable  to  its  develop- 
ment ;  and  it  should  use  all  its  influence  on  opinion, 
and  all  the  power  that  it  could  get,  to  destroy  the 
existing  political  organisation  and  to  "  wrest  from 
the  State  and  the  local  authorities  all  their  attribu- 
tions, one  by  one,  to  transfer  them  to  the  prole- 
tarian organisms  in  course  of  formation,  that  is  to 
say,  the  Trade  Unions."  The  proletariat  should 
emancipate  itself  here  and  now  from  all  but  internal 
direction.  Its  first  rule  of  conduct  should  be  to 
remain  exclusively  proletarian.  It  should  accept 
the  help  of  intellectuals  but  not  allow  them  to 
direct  it.  "  To  sum  up  my  whole  idea,"  said  Sorel, 
"  the  future  of  Socialism  depends  on  the  autono- 
mous development  of  the  Trade  Unions." 

Later  on,  Sorel  changed  his  mind  about  political 
action,  which  he  admitted,  as  will  have  been  seen, 
in  1898,  and  advised  reliance  on  "  direct  "  or  indus- 
trial action  alone.  In  this  he  was  followed  by  the 
C.G.T.,  when  it  officially  adopted  his  principles  in 
1906.  Instead  of  parliamentary  action,  with  the 
object  of  obtaining  protective  laws  putting  the 
proletariat  under  the  tutelage  of  the  State,  Sorel 
recommended  direct  action  to  secure  from  the 
legislators  facilities  for  autonomous  development. 
For  example,  labour  registry  offices  should  be  under 
the  control  of  the  Trade  Unions,  not  of  the  muni- 
cipalities ;  so  should  old-age  pensions  and  out-of- 


REVOLUTIONARY  SYNDICALISM     105 

work  allowances,  poor  relief,  factory  inspection 
and  similar  functions.  In  fact,  the  object  of  Trade 
Union  action  should  be,  not  to  conquer  political 
power  and  capture  the  State  in  order  to  abolish  it 
after  having  temporarily  made  use  of  it,  but  gradu- 
ally to  substitute  the  Trade  Unions  for  the  State. 
The  class- war,  as  Sorel  conceives  it,  "  is  not  a 
struggle  to  capture  the  positions  held  by  the  bour- 
geois and  dress  up  in  their  cast-off  clothes  ;  it  is  a 
struggle  to  drain  all  the  life  out  of  the  bourgeois 
political  organisation  and  transfer  all  that  is  useful 
in  it  to  a  proletarian  political  organisation,  gradually 
created  as  the  proletariat  develops." 

-The-  ^bFsfc  ~|*Fea&~4tff erencev  tKeriT  between  ~  the 
purely  Marxist  conception  of  the  social  revolution 
and  that  of  Syndicalism  is  that  the  former  contem- 
plates a  revolution  followed  by  a  period  of  transi-  j 
tion  "  during  which  the  State  can  be  nothing  else  \ 
than  a  revolutionary  dictatorship  of  the  prole-  ' 
tariat,"  whereas  the  latter  contemplates  a  gradual 
undermining  of  the  State,  of  which  the  revolution 
is  to  be  the  climax.  In  the  one  case  the  period  of 
transition  or  preparation  follows  the  revolution  ;  in 
the  other  it  precedes  it.  The  second  great  differ- 
ence between  Syndicalism  and  Marxism,  at  any 
rate  as  interpreted  by  the  Russian  Communists  and 
the  Third  International,  is  that  the  latter  relies  on 
the  Communist  Party  as  the  chief  instrument  of 
social  revolution,  whereas  Syndicalism  relies  on  the 
Trade  Unions.  But  the  belief  of  the  neo-Bona- 
partist  Communists  in  the  revolutionary  possibili- 
ties of  an  active  minority  was  shared  by  many  of  the 


106    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

Syndicalists  and  was  even  predominant  among  them 
before  the  War.     In  the  case  of  the  Syndicalists, 
as  in  that  of  the  Communists,  it  was  a  reaction 
against    the    futility    of    democratism.       Pouget, 
in  his    pamphlet,    La    Confederation    generate    du 
Travail,   objected  to    a    democratic    system    even 
within  the  Trade  Unions,  on  the  ground  that  the  / 
lack  of  will  of  the  majority  would  paralyse  action./ 
The  minority,  he  said,  were  not  disposed  to  abdicate! 
before  the  inertia  of  a  mass  not  yet  inspired  by  thej 
spirit  of  revolt,  and  it  was  the  duty  of  the  minority^ 
to  act  without  taking  the  majority  into  account.      I 
Unfortunately,  whenever  the  minority  did  sp/atrE7 
the  results  were  far  from  satisfactory.     Tne  con- 
stitution of  the  C.G.T.  was  such  that  it  could  be 
controlled  by  a  revolutionary  minority  from  very 
small,  and  even,  in  some  cases,  bogus  Unions  ;  for 
each  Union  had  one  representative  and  one  vote, 
no  matter  what  the  number  of  its  members.     More- 
over, it  was  thought  unnecessary  to  make  any  great 
effort  to  get  the  mass  of  the  workmen  into  the 
Unions.      In  1914  the  2100  Trade  Unions  affiliated 
to   the   C.G.T.   had   a   total   membership   of   only 
661,162 — the  highest  on  record  up  to  that  time. 
In  1912  the  membership  had  been  575,276.     In  the 
United  Kingdom  the  total  Trade  Union  member- 
ship was  3,226,000  in  1912  and  4,199,000  in  1914. 
The  result  was  that,  whenever  industrial  action  was 
attempted  in  France,  it  almost  always  failed,  often 
with  disastrous  consequences  to  the  Unions.     The 
railway  strike  of  1910  reduced  the  membership  of 
the  Railway  Unions  almost  to  nothing.     For  the 


REVOLUTIONARY  SYNDICALISM      107 

decision  to  take  action  was  usually  made  by  the 
representatives  of  a  minority  even  of  the  Trade 
Unionists,  who  did  not  follow  their  self-appointed 
leaders,  and  the  bulk  of  the  workmen  were  outside 
the  Unions  altogether. 

The  War  kilkd/Uie_Jl£x£iye-nftin<^^ 
modified  Syndicalist  theory.  General  mobilisation 
enormously  reduced  the  active  Trade  Union  member- 
ship during  the  first  two  years  of  the  War,  but  the 
development  of  munition  works,  to  which  men  were 
brought  back  from  the  front,  brought  new  recruits, 
and  in  1918  the  C.G.T.  had  2500  affiliated  Unions, 
with  a  total  membership  of  nearly  amillion  (997,548). 
After  the  Armistice  the  membership  rapidly 
increased  and  by  the  end  of  1919  it  was  2,049,231. 
This  change  led  to  what  is  called  the  "  Reformist  " 
policy  of  the  C.G.T. ,  which  is  not  Reformist  in  the 
proper  sense  of  the  term.  The  C.G.T.  has  simply 
become  a  Trade  Union  organisation,  instead  of 
being  merely  a  revolutionary  general  staff.  The 
influx  of  new  members,  for  the  most  part  not 
"  class-conscious,"  made  that  inevitable.  But  the 
C.G.T.  has  not  abandoned  its  Syndicalist  prin- 
ciples, although  it  is  now  recognised  that  revolu- 
tionary action  must  be  postponed  until  the  bulk  of 
the  workmen  have  been  organised.  The  present 
situation  is  the  consequence  of  the  mistakes  in  pre- 
war policy. 

Some  of  the  most  ardent  "  active  minority " 
Syndicalists,  while  remaining  in  the  Trade  Unions, 
have  gone  over  to  the  Communist  Party,  attracted, 
no  doubt,  by  its  anti-democratic  tendencies  and  its 


108    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

promise    of    an    immediate    revolution.     Former 
anarchists    and    libertarians    have    thus    become 
advocates,  at  least  in  theory,  of  "  iron  discipline  " 
and  the  dictatorship  of  the  proletariat.     Having 
obtained  a  majority  on  the  Executive  of  the  Rail- 
waymen's  Federation,  they  tried  their  hand  once 
more  in  May  1920  at  the  "  active  minority  "  tactics. 
They  called  a  railway  strike  without  consulting  the 
C.G  T.,  although  they  had  undertaken  not  to  do 
that,    and    rushed    the    whole    of   French    Trade 
Unionism  into  a  general  strike,  which  failed  utterly. 
The  consequence  was  a  reduction  of  60  per  cent, 
in  the  membership   of  the  Trade  Unions.     It  is 
to  be  feared  that  they  have  not  yet  learned  the 
lesson,  which  is,  nevertheless,  plain  enough.     Every- 
thing in  this  world  is  done  by  active  minorities, 
but  in  a  country  with  a  long  democratic  tradition,  ^ 
however    imperfectly    democratic    its    institutions 
may  be,  no  minority,  however  active,  can  "  make  a 
revolution,"  or  effect  anything,  unless  it  has  the 
confidence  of  the  majority,  which  is  ready  to  follow^ 
it.     As  the  Italian  Trade  Unionist,  Baldesi,  said : 
"  A  dictatorship  of  the  Russian  type  is  not  possible 
in  a  country  like  Italy,  with   a  long   democratic 
tradition.    For  in  Italy  we  are  all  a  little  anarchist." 
That  is  equally  true  of  France  and  England.     Mr 
Bernard  Shaw  has  indeed  said  that  "  in  England 
the  majority  will  never  be  converted  to  the  need  of 
Government   at   all ;  nine-tenths   of   us   are   born 
anarchists."     If  that  be  true — and  I  think  it  is 
only  an  exaggeration  of  the  truth — England  is  the 
most  hopeful  country  in  the  world  for  a  libertarian 


REVOLUTIONARY  SYNDICALISM      109 

Socialist   experiment ;  and   the   least   hopeful   for 
an  attempt  at  the  dictatorship  of  the  proletariat. 

While  the  method  of  revolutionary  Syndicalism 
is  quite  different  from  that  of  Marx,  its  purpose,  it 
will  be  seen,  is  the  same — to  smash  the  existing 
State  machinery.  Syndicalists  are  quite  ready 
to  use  force,  if  necessary — indeed,  Sorel,  in  his 
Reflexions  sur  la  Violence  maintains  that  it  will 
be  necessary — but  they  do  not  expect  from  force 
more  than  it  can  accomplish,  and,  for  Sorel, 
the  strike  is  a  form  of  violence.  When  the 
proletariat  has  accomplished  its  autonomy  and 
built  up  its  own  institutions,  the  final  blow  will 
be  given  to  the  bourgeois  State  by  the  general 
strike,  the  occupation  of  the  factories,  or  whatever 
means  appear  most  likely  to  be  effective  at  the 
moment. 

One  of  the  strongest  points  in  the  Syndicalist 
theory,  in  my  opinion,  is  its  insistence  on  the  neces- 
sity that  the  proletariat  should  educate  and  prepare 
itself  for  the  social  revolution.  In  his  speech  at 
Nancy,  already  mentioned,  Lagardelle  said  to  the 
Marxists  : — - 

"  You  will  be  the  masters  of  the  hour,  you 
will  have  all  the  power  that  yesterday  belonged 
to  the  bourgeoisie,  you  will  pile  decree  on 
decree  and  law  on  law,  but  you  will  not  work 
a  miracle  and  you  will  not  make  the  workmen 
suddenly  capable  of  replacing  the  capitalists. 
How,  I  ask  you,  will  the  possession  of  power 
by  a  few  Socialist  politicians  transform  the 
psychology  of  the  masses,  modify  sentiments, 


110    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

increase  capacities,  create  new  rules  of  life, 
and  make  it  possible  for  a  society  of  free 
men  to  exist  in  place  of  a  society  of  masters 
and  slaves  ?  No  !  The  transformation  of  the 
world  does  not  depend  on  a  simple  change  of 
Government.  That  would  be  really  too  easy, 
and  the  course  of  history  is  more  exacting. 
A  social  order  is  not  brought  into  being  without 
a  long  preparation  and  it  is  here  that  Syndi- 
calism, with  a  more  realist  sense  of  things  as 
they  are,  opposes  to  your  theory  what  I  have 
called  the  Socialism  of  institutions.  It  reminds 
the  workers  that  no  change  will  be  possible 
until  they  have  created  with  their  own  hands 
a  whole  series  of  institutions  intended  to 
replace  the  bourgeois  institutions." 

This  courageous  utterance  may  be  compared  with 
a  passage  from  Francis  Delaisi's  La  Democratic 
et  les  Financiers  *  : — 

"  The  people  ought  to  know  that,  so  long  as 
it  has  not  an  elite  of  capacities  to  oppose  to 
the  capitalist  elite,  it  will  arrive  at  nothing. 
What  good  would  it  do  to  a  poor  devil  to  seize 
on  an  automobile  if  he  did  not  know  how  to 
start  and  drive  it  ?  The  economic  machine  is 
far  more  complicated  than  an  automobile.  Is 
there  in  the  general  staff  of  politicians  that  the 
proletariat  has  at  its  disposal  a  single  man 
capable  of  managing  the  Bank  of  France  or  the 
Creusot  Works  ?  And  it  is  proposed,  not 
*  Published  by  La  Guerre  Sociale,  Paris,  1910,  p.  63. 


REVOLUTIONARY  SYNDICALISM     111 

merely  to  control  credit  and  production  as 
they  are,  but  to  perfect  them  and  reconstruct 
them  on  a  new  plan.  Before  capitalist 
society  can  be  conquered  by  force,  it  must  be 
conquered  by  intelligence.  Otherwise  every 
insurrectional  movement,  even  if  victorious, 
is  doomed  in  advance  to  failure  and  counter- 
revolution." 

The  warnings  of  Lagardelle  and  -  Delaisi  have 
been  justified  by  events  in  Russia.  Not  that 
intelligence  has  been  lacking  in  the  Russian  revolu- 
tion ;  far  from  it.  But  it  has  not  been  proletarian 
intelligence.  The  Russian  proletariat  is  directed 
entirely,  as  Sorel  said  the  proletariat  never  should 
be,  by  intellectuals.  In  my  opinion,  Sorel  was 
right ;  the  workers  must  achieve  their  own  eman- 
cipation. To  do  that,  they  must  be  educated. 
It  is  better  that  they  should  wait  until  they  can 
"  conquer_capitalism  by  intelligence,"  rather  than 
allow  themselves  to  be  led  bylntelleCttlals,  who  are  ' 
sure  to  make  mistakes,  as  they  have  in  Russia, 
because  they  have  only  theoretical  knowledge  of 
proletarian  thoughts  and  needs  and,  above  all, 
because  they  are  too  much  disposed  to  think  that 
they  know  better  than  the  proletariat  what  is  good 
for  it.  That  tendency  is  at  the  bottom  of  the 
Russian  despotism,  trying  to  interpret  the  "  real 
will  "  of  the  people. 

In  England  the  education  of  the  proletariat  has 
made  vast  strides  in  the  last  few  years  and  what 
M.  Delaisi  said  more  than  ten  years  ago  is  no  longer 


112    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

true.  The  proletariat  has  an  elite  of  capacities 
that  can  be  compared  to  the  capitalist  elite, 
although  it  is  not  for  the  most  part  to  be  found 
among  the  politicians.  The  quiet,  steady  work 
that  is  being  done  by  Labour  Colleges  and  other 
educational  institutions  is  doing  more  to  prepare 
the  society  of  the  future  than  perhaps  any  other 
agency.  It  has  already  had  most  satisfactory 
results.  Nobody  that  remembers  as  I  do  the 
British  Labour  movement  of  thirty  years  ago  and 
compares  it  with  the  Labour  movement  of  to-day, 
can  fail  to  recognise  the  immense  advance  that  has 
been  made  in  knowledge  and  general  culture. 
There  were  always  intelligent  men  in  the  Labour 
movement,  for  intelligence  is  not  a  matter  of  class 
or  education  or  instruction,  but  the  proportion 
of  instructed  men  in  the  movement  has  greatly 
increased  and  is  steadily  increasing.  The  old 
tendency  to  depreciate  knowledge  and  instruction 
has  passed  away.  The  workmen  now  realise  what 
an  advantage  knowledge  and  instruction  have  given 
to  the  bourgeoisie,  and  they  have  determined  to 
instruct  themselves.  There  is  perhaps  a  greater 
demand  for  serious  books  among  the  proletariat 
than  in  the  other  classes — that  is  almost  certainly 
true  of  books  on  economic  questions.  A  London 
publisher  told  me  that  he  had  sold  two  thousand 
copies  of  a  stiff  economic  work  entirely  through 
Labour  organisations.  Herein  is  the  great  hope 
of  the  future. 

Great  Britain,  with  its  millions  of  Trade  Unionists 
and  its  traditional  attachment  to  personal  liberty, 


REVOLUTIONARY  SYNDICALISM      113 

is  the  country  of  all  others  where  the  Syndicalist 
method  is  suitable.  But  the  Trade  Unions,  if  they 
are  to  adopt  it  effectively,  must  improve  and 
co-ordinate  their  organisation  and  widen  the  scope 
of  their  action.  Political  action  should  by  no 
means  be  abandoned,  but  it  should  be  recognised 
that  it  can  never  do  as  much  as  direct  or  indus- 
trial action.  To  limit  direct  action  dogmatically 
to  what  are  called  purely  industrial  objects,xthat  is 
to  say  in  reality  questions  of  wages  and  conditions 
of  labour,  is  to  throw  aside  the  most  powerful 
weapon  that  the  Trade  Unions  possess.  The 
Trade  Unions  should  press  with  all  their  strength 
for  an  ever-increasing  share  in  the  control  and  man- 
agement of  industry  and  for  greater  and  greater 
powers  of  the  kind  suggested  by  Sorel.  The  control 
should  be  positive  as  opposed  to  the  merely  nega- 
tive control  hitherto  exercised  by  Trade  Union 
regulations — not  joint  control  with  the  employers, 
but  independent  and  autonomous  control,  of  which 
the  shop  stewards'  committees  are  the  beginning. 
This  will  never  be  accomplished  by  political  action 
alone.  The  collective  strength  of  the  Trade  Unions 
cannot  be  exercised  in  an  election,  when  the  Trade 
Unionist,  like  other  electors,  is  faced  with  confused 
issues  and  innumerable  questions  of  every  kind, 
and  there  is  the  women's  vote  forming  a  solid  con- 
servative block.  In  every  country  where  the 
franchise  has  been  extended  to  women  conserva- 
tism and  reaction  have  been  strengthened.  I  do 
not  say  that  for  that  reason  it  ought  not  to  have 
been  given,  but  the  fact  makes  political  action 

H 


114    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

even  more  inadequate  and  direct  action  more 
necessary  than  before.  If  political  action  is  to 
have  any  effect  at  all,  it  must  be  backed  by  direct 
action,  as  it  has  been  in  Italy.  It  was  the  occupa- 
tion of  the  factories  that  forced  the  Italian  Govern- 
ment to  introduce  a  measure  giving  the  workmen  a 
share  in  the  control  of  industry.  It  is  not  an  ade- 
quate measure,  but  it  is  by  no  means  entirely  use- 
less. On  the  contrary,  it  is  the  first  step  in  a  process 
that  will  inevitably  continue. 

The  Italian  occupation  of  the  factories  was  the 
most  successful  and  encouraging  example  of  the 
Syndicalist  method  that  we  have  yet  had.  It  is 
not  true  that  the  attempt  to  run  the  factories 
failed.  It  succeeded  so  well  wherever  the  tech- 
nicians and  engineers  co-operated,  as  they  mostly 
did,  that  in  some  cases  the  output  was  increased 
from  20  to  30  per  cent.  This  appears  from  an 
admirable  account  of  the  whole  movement  by  a 
special  correspondent  published  in  the  Manchester 
Guardian  in  October  1920.  The  movement  might 
have  ended  in  a  social  revolution  but  for  the  fear 
that  Italy  would  be  treated  as  Russia  has  been 
treated,  and  would  be  deprived  of  the  necessaries 
for  which  she  is  dependent  on  other  countries. 
What  was  done  in  Italy  could  be  done  in  England, 
and  some  day,  no  doubt,  it  will  be  done.  Other 
examples  of  the  Syndicalist  method  are  the  forma- 
tion of  Building  Guilds  in  England  and  the 
acquisition  of  five  ships  by  the  Garibaldi  Marine 
Co-operative  Society  at  Genoa,  which  is  working 
them  successfully.  A  good  example  of  them  has 


REVOLUTIONARY  SYNDICALISM     115 

also  been  given  by  the  Sinn  Feiners,  whose  method 
of  building  up  political  institutions  of  their  own 
to  replace  those  of  the  English  State  closely  re- 
sembles the  tactics  of  the  Syndicalists. 

An  excellent  example  has  been  set  in  France  by 
the  formation  of  the  Economic  Council  of  Labour, 
composed  of  representatives  of  the  C.G.T.,  of  the 
co-operative  societies,  of  the  non-manual  workers, 
and  of  Government  servants.  It  has  been  violently 
attacked  by  the  Communist  minority  of  the  C.G.T., 
on  the  ground  that  bourgeois  are  admitted  into  it. 
Yet  it  is  essential  to  the  success  of  the  Syndicalist 
method  that  the  "  black-coated  proletariat  "  should 
be  drawn  into  Trade  Unionism  and  their  particular 
function  in  industry  recognised.  Industry  could 
not  be  carried  on  without  the  non-manual  workers 
and  it  is  of  vital  importance  that  they  should  make 
common  cause  with  the  manual  workers.  The 
Trade  Union  of  every  industry  should  include  all 
the  workers  of  every  kind  in  that  industry,  both 
manual  and  non-manual ;  that  is  the  ideal  to  be 
aimed  at.  The  purpose  of  the  Economic  Council  of 
Labour  is  to  study  the  methods  of  gradually  en- 
croaching on  the  control  of  industry  and  wresting 
its  functions  from  the  State.  It  has  been  in  exist- 
ence for  too  short  a  time  to  make  it  possible  to 
judge  its  utility,  but  it  is  an  instrument  that, 
properly  used,  should  be  capable  of  doing  much. 

The  Syndicalist  method  avoids  the  dangers  of 
the  dictatorship  of  the  proletariat.  It  involves 
no  centralisation,  no  repression  of  personal  liberty, 
no  preservation  of  the  State,  even  temporarily, 


116    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

after  the  social  revolution.  If  it  were  vigorously 
put  into  practice,  the  State  and  the  capitalist 
class  might  be  so  much  weakened  when  the  moment 
of  the  social  revolution  arrived,  that  the  latter 
would  merely  give  the  final  blow  to  a  tottering 
edifice.  If  the  capitalist  class  were  strong  enough 
to  resist  by  force,  no  doubt  force  would  have  to  be 
used  against  it,  but  the  struggle  would  be  short  and 
sharp  in  a  country  where  the  proletariat  was  the 
great  majority  and  thoroughly  well  organised.  It 
is  a  gradual  method  of  course,  but  a  vast  economic 
change  can  only  be  brought  about  gradually,  which 
does  not  necessarily  mean  that  the  process  must  be 
very  long.  I  am  convinced  that,  in  England  at 
any  rate,  it  need  not  last  half  a  century  or  anything 
like  so  long.  It  is  not  an  "  evolutionary  "  method, 
because  a  Socialist  society  cannot  be  evolved  out 
of  a  capitalist  one  ;  on  the  contrary,  it  will  destroy 
capitalist  society  by  sapping  and  mining  it.  The 
method  by  which  Guild  Socialists  propose  to  reach 
Socialism  seems  to  me  to  be  identical  with  the 
Syndicalist  method.  What  Mr  Cole  happily  calls 
the  method  of  "  encroachment  "  is  precisely  what 
is  indicated  by  Sorel  and  Lagardelle.  It  is  the 
most  scientific  method  and  that  best  adapted  to  a 
great  industrial  country  with  a  highly  organised 
proletariat. 

The  ultimate  aim  of  revolutionary  Syndicalism 
is,  in  the  words  of  Pouget,  the  "  reorganisation  of 
society  on  the  Communist  plan  "  and  the  transfer- 
ence to  the  Trade  Unions  of  the  "  few  useful 
functions  "  of  the  State  and  the  municipalities, 


REVOLUTIONARY  SYNDICALISM     117 

the  others  being  simply  suppressed.  The  latter 
proposal  reproduces  the  fundamental  vice  of  that 
very  democratism  to  which  Syndicalism  is  so 
bitterly  opposed — the  concentration  of  all  functions 
in  the  hands  of  a  single  organism.  The  Trade 
Unions,  like  the  Paris  Commune,  would  have  a 
universal  competence.  It  is  probable  that  all 
Syndicalists  would  not  now  insist  on  this  part  of 
their  original  programme.  In  any  case,  the  system 
of  functional  representation  proposed  by  Mr  Cole 
is  much  to  be  preferred. 

There  are  also  grave  objections  to  the  economic 
proposals  of  pure  Syndicalism.  The  Syndicalist 
form  of  Communism  differs  widely  from  the  Marxist 
form,  for,  according  to  the  Syndicalist  theory, 
the  means  of  production  other  than  land  would 
belong  to  the  Trade  Unions,  which  would  have  the 
whole  management  and  control  of  production. 
The  objections  to  this  system  are  particularly 
obvious  in  the  case  of  public  services,  like  railways, 
and  natural  monopolies,  like  mines.  I  should 
suppose  that  in  a  Socialist  society  railway  travel- 
ling and  every  other  form  of  common  transport 
would  be  as  free  as  travelling  on  foot.  After  all, 
when  the  railways  and  other  forms  of  transport 
cease  to  be  private  property,  there  is  no  more  reason 
why  individuals  should  pay  for  taking  a  train  or 
a  tram  than  for  using  a  road.  People  used  to  pay 
for  using  the  roads  in  England,  except  when  they 
were  on  foot,  but  nobody  would  propose  to  restore 
the  turnpikes.  The  time  will  come  when  it  will 
seem  as  unnatural  to  pay  for  getting  into  a  train  as 


118    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

it  would  be  to  pay  a  fee  every  time  one  walked  out 
of  one's  house  into  the  street.  Free  transport  of 
every  kind  and  free  posts,  telegraphs  and  telephones 
would  have  effects  of  incalculable  benefit  on  pro- 
duction and  exchange,  on  international  relations, 
and  on  human  solidarity.  It  is  obvious  that,  if 
the  railways  are  to  be  free,  they  cannot  be  the  pro- 
perty of  the  railway  workers,  who  in  that  case  would 
starve. 

Further,  the  railway  workers  could  not  be  allowed 
to  decide  such  matters  as  the  number  of  trains 
and  their  hours  merely  to  suit  their  own  conveni- 
ence and  without  regard  to  that  of  the  public. 
Nor  could  the  postal  workers  be  allowed  to  decide, 
without  regard  to  the  public  convenience,  how  many 
collections  and  deliveries  of  letters  there  should  be. 
The  consumers,  that  is,  the  community  as  a  whole, 
must  have  a  voice  in  such  matters.  The  impossi- 
bility of  making  public  services  and  natural  mono- 
polies Trade  Union  property  is  now  recognised  by 
the  French  Syndicalists,  who  propose  for  them  the 
system  of  "  industrialised  nationalisation  "  men- 
tioned in  a  previous  chapter.  That  system  is  no 
doubt  the  best  in  existing  economic  conditions, 
but  there  are  other  ways  of  giving  the  consumers 
a  voice  in  the  regulation  of  such  matters  in  a 
Socialist  society. 

As  regards  industry  in  general,  the  Syndicalist 
system  is  open  to  the  grave  objection  that  it  might 
give  the  respective  Trade  Unions  a  monopoly. 
As  I  understand  it,  it  would  mean  that  every 
worker  would  have  to  belong  to  a  Trade  Union  and 


REVOLUTIONARY  SYNDICALISM     119 

independent  production  would  be  suppressed. 
That  in  itself  would  be  a  serious  restriction  of 
personal  liberty,  of  which  Syndicalists  are  ardent 
defenders.  And,  if  every  industry  were  owned 
and  controlled  by  a  single  national  Trade  Union, 
the  consumers  would  be  at  its  mercy  and  all  the 
evils  of  monopoly  would  ensue.  If,  as  some 
Syndicalists  propose,  each  factory  were  owned  by 
the  workers  in  it,  that  objection  would  be  removed, 
for  in  that  case  there  would  be  no  monopoly  and 
competition  would  continue.  The  pure  Syndicalist 
system  has,  however,  the  drawback  of  being  based 
entirely  on  the  producer  and  leaving  out  of  account 
the  interests  of  the  consumer.  Some  Socialists 
hold  that,  in  a  society  where  every  able-bodied 
person  was  a  producer,  that  would  not  matter, 
since  the  consumer  and  the  producer  would  be 
identical.  There  is  a  confusion  of  thought  in  this 
argument.  At  present  the  vast  majority  of  men 
are  both  producers  and  consumers,  but  the  interests 
of  an  individual  as  a  producer  are  not  identical 
with  his  interests  as  a  consumer  and,  in  any  form 
of  society,  there  might  well  be  a  conflict  of  interest 
between  a  particular  group  of  producers  and  the 
rest  of  society.  Here  again  functional  representa- 
tion is  needed.  The  Guild  Socialists  are  right 
in  holding  that  an  economic  system  should  not 
be  based  either  entirely  on  the  producer  or  entirely 
on  the  consumer,  but  should  take  into  account  the 
interests  of  both. 

The  general  principle  of  the  Syndicalist  system, 
like   the   Syndicalist  method,   is,   in   my   opinion, 


120    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

more  suited  to  existing  conditions  in  the  great 
industrial  countries  than  pure  Marxism.  Sorel 
was  right  in  saying  that  it  was  an  application 
of  Marxist  principles  to  changed  conditions,  for 
the  fundamental  Marxist  principle  is  that  Socialist 
theory  should  be  an  induction  from  an  existing 
class- struggle — "  from  a  historical  movement  going 
on  under  our  very  eyes."  The  most  important 
movement  going  on  under  our  very  eyes  is  the  Trade 
Union  movement,  the  development  of  which  has 
modified  the  conditions  of  the  class- struggle,  to  the 
advantage  of  the  proletariat.  The  Trade  Unions 
are  the  only  agency  by  which  Socialism  can  be 
brought  about.  A  revolution  can  never  be  imposed 
on  the  millions  of  Trade  Unionists  by  any  active 
minority,  nor  will  the  workmen  in  a  country  with 
a  long  democratic  tradition  ever  submit  to  the 
dictatorship  of  the  Communist  or  any  other  party^ 

In  a  country  like  Russia,  where  the  people  are 
habituated  to  despotism,  it  may  be  comparatively 
easy  to  transfer  them  from  one  despotism  to 
another.  In  a  country  like  England  no  Socialist 
system  that  is  not  democratic  and  libertarian  will 
ever  succeed.  The  attempt  to  impose  pure  Marxism 
— still  more  the  elementary  Marxism  of 
Communist  Manifesto — is,  in  the  strict  sense  of  the 
term,  reactionary.  Moreover,  it  transforms  into 
dogmas  what  Marx  put  forward  as  hypotheses.  It 
is  more  in  accordance  with  the  spirit  of  Marx  to 
take  account  of  the  modifications  in  economic 
conditions  and  modify  the  hypotheses  accordingly. 

For    my  part,   however,    I    cannot    accept   the 


REVOLUTIONARY  SYNDICALISM    -121 

pure  Syndicalist  theory  as  a  satisfactory  working 
hypothesis  for  the  formation  of  a  libertarian  Socialist 
society.  It  needs  modification  to  meet  the  objec- 
tions that  have  been  mentioned.  The  best  working 
hypothesis,  in  many  respects,  that  has  yet  been  for- 
mulated is,  in  my  opinion,  that  of  Guild  Socialism, 
of  which  Mr  Cole  is  the  chief  exponent.  It  is,  in 
fact,  an  attempt  at  a  synthesis  between  Marxism 
and  Syndicalism  and  has  the  great  advantage  of 
being  both  decentralising  and  democratic  and  of 
respecting  personal  liberty.  But  I  have  certain 
objections  to  make  to  some  of  the  proposals  of 
Guild  Socialism,  which  will  be  dealt  with  in  the 
next  chapter. 


CHAPTER  VIII. 

LIBERTARIAN  SOCIALISM. 

IT  is  not  my  purpose  to  plan  out  in  detail  a  complete 
social  system.  Apart  from  the  fact  that  such  a 
task  would  involve  several  volumes,  whereas  I 
have  only  a  few  pages,  I  do  not  believe  it  to  be 
possible.  The  details  of  the  new  social  order  can 
be  worked  out  only  in  practice ;  they  cannot  be 
settled  in  advance.  All  that  one  can  do  is  to 
suggest  the  broad  lines  on  which  a  Socialist  society 
should  be  ordered,  so  as  to  secure  for  each  individual 
the  maximum  of  liberty,  or  rather  the  minimum  of 
constraint. 

The  first  and  most  important  means  of  production 
is  the  land,  for  without  it  nobody  could  exist  or 
produce  at  all.  Its  socialisation  is,"  therefore,  the 
first  and  most  important  of  socialisations.  Liber- 
tarian Socialists  would  effect  it  by  the  simple 
process  of  expropriating  the  economic  rent,  which 
would  be  collected  by  the  community  instead  of 
by  the  land-owners.  This  is  a  change  that  might  be 
effected  by  constitutional  methods  and  it  is  aston- 
ishing that,  although  land  nationalisation  is  included 
in  the  programme  of  the  Labour  Party,  that  party 

122 


LIBERTARIAN  SOCIALISM  123 

insists  on  it  so  little  and  gives  it  no  prominence  in 
elections  or  public  meetings.  Indeed,  one  heard 
much  more  about  land  nationalisation  twenty  or 
thirty  years  ago  than  one  does  now.  It  has  been 
put  in  the  background  in  favour  of  proposals  of  less 
importance  from  every  point  of  view,  and,  in  par- 
ticular, from  the  point  of  view  of  bringing  Socialism 
nearer.  The  Reformists,  who  believe  it  possible 
to  reach  Socialism  by  constitutional  and  parlia- 
mentary methods,  neglect  the  very  question  to 
which  those  methods  could  be  successfully  applied, 
and  devote  their  energies  to  the  municipalisation 
of  milk  or  beer,  about  which  nobody  cares  a  brass 
button  and  which  would  do  nothing  at  all  to  bring 
Socialism  nearer. 

The  appropriation  by  the  community  of  the 
economic  rent  of  land  would  be  an  extremely 
popular  proposal  in  all  classes  except  the  small 
class  unpleasantly  affected  by  it.  The  support  of 
the  great  majority  of  the  middle  classes  could  be 
obtained  for  it.  So  should  that  of  Manchester 
Liberals,  if  any  such  still  exist  and  if  they  retain 
any  belief  in  their  own  principles.  The  expropria- 
tion of  the  economic  rent  is  advocated  by  extreme 
individualists,  such  as  my  friend,  Mr  August  Schvan, 
and  M.  Henri  Lambert,  the  Belgian  economist,  on 
the  logical  ground  that  land  is  a  natural  monopoly 
and  that,  on  individualist  principles,  there  should  be 
no  private  monopoly.  It  could  be  done  in  a  Budget 


124    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

by  imposing  a  tax  of  twenty  shillings  in  the  pound 
on  ground  rents,  but  that  would  not  be  a  safe  or 
satisfactory  way  of  doing  it.  For  what  is  done  in 
one  Budget  can  be  undone  in  another.  Moreover, 
public  opinion  would  not  tolerate  a  proposal  to 
expropriate  land-owners  without  compensation, 
while  all  other  capitalists  were  left  in  possession. 
It  would  be  impossible  to  take  all  the  fortune  of  a 
man  that  happened  to  have  invested  his  money  in 
ground  rents  and  leave  untouched  that  of  his 
brother,  who  had  inherited  the  same  sum  from  their 
father  and  invested  it  in  another  way.  It  would  be 
foolish  to  give  such  a  handle  to  our  opponents. 
Moreover,  there  is  no  real  distinction  between 
private  property  in  land  and  private  property  in 
other  means  of  production. 

Mr  August  Schvan  has  made  the  practical  pro- 
posal that  the  land-owners  should  be  compensated 
to  the  extent  of  a  certain  proportion  of  the  capi- 
talised value  of  their  rents — say  half — and  the  sum 
necessary  for  that  purpose  should  be  raised  by  a 
levy  on  other  forms  of  capital.  From  the  Socialist 
point  of  view  this  would  have  the  great  advantage 
of  partially  expropriating  all  capitalists.  It  would 
be  necessary  to  compensate  in  full  persons  with 
incomes  not  exceeding  a  small  maximum  entirely 
derived  from  land,  or  at  least  to  pay  them  their 
incomes  for  life.  And  persons  owning  less  than  a 
certain  capital  should  be  exempt  from  the  capital 


LIBERTARIAN  SOCIALISM  125 

levy,  which  should  be  graduated.  There  could,  of 
course,  be  no  question  of  compensation  if  economic 
rent  were  expropriated  as  the  result  of  a  social 
revolution,  together  with  other  forms  of  capital. 
But  it  is  desirable  not  to  wait  for  the  social  revolu- 
tion to  take  it  over.  There  are  probably  some 
capitalists  intelligent  enough  to  recognise  that  their 
only  chance  of  not  losing  all  is  to  sacrifice  half, 
and  they  might  even  support  such  a  proposal  as 
has  been  suggested  in  the  hope  of  staving  off  a 
social  revolution,  or  at  least  postponing  it.  If 
there  are  any  such,  let  us  by  all  means  accept  their 
support,  without  guaranteeing  their  hopes. 

The  economic  rent,  if  and  when  expropriated  in 
existing  conditions,  should  not  be  used  for  any 
State  purposes,  least  of  all  for  paying  interest  on 
or  extinguishing  the  National  Debt.  I  fail  to  under- 
stand why  the  Labour  Party  bothers  itseK  about 
the  National  Debt.  Sooner  or  later  the  National 
Debt  will  have  to  be  repudiated,  if  not  In  name,  at 
least  in  fact  by  some  subterfuge,  and  we  may  leave 
it  at  that.  It  is  true  that  a  capital  levy  to  pay  off 
the  National  Debt  would  in  fact  be  a  partial  repudia- 
tion. In  any  case,  when  we  have  got  the  economic 
rent,  let  us  stick  to  it  and  not  pour  it  into  the 
insatiable  maw  of  the  State.  It  has  been  proposed 
to  distribute  it  among  the  municipalities  in  pro- 
portion to  their  population,  but  for  my  part  I 
much  prefer  the  suggestion  of  Mr  August  Schvan 


126    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

that  it  should  be  divided  equally  among  all  the 
inhabitants  of  the  country.  The  sum  received 
annually  by  each  would,  of  course,  be  small,  but 
it  would  count  in  the  budget  of  families  with  small 
incomes,  for  every  child  would  receive  his  or  her 
share  from  birth.  The  shares  of  children  under 
sixteen  should  be  paid  to  their  mother,  whether 
married  or  not,  or — only  in  cases  where  the  mother 
was  dead  or  deprived  of  the  legal  custody  of  her 
children — to  the  father  or  other  legal  guardian. 
An  endowment  of  motherhood  would  thus  be 
provided  and  women  would  be  put  economically  in 
a  more  independent  position.  In  a  Socialist  society 
the  economic  rent  might  be  applied  to  education 
and  other  public  purposes,  but  that  is  a  question  for 
the  future. 

The  system  to  be  avoided  in  regard  to  land  and 
buildings  is  that  which,  I  understand,  exists  in  the 
Russian  towns,  where  the  State  does  not  collect 
the  economic  rent  and  some  authority  allots  a 
tenement  to  each  individual  or  family,  who  thus 
live  rent  free.  This  simply  means  that  a  present  of 
the  economic  rent  is  made  to  the  occupiers  for  the 
time  being.  No  doubt  the  quartering  of  prole- 
tarian families  in  the  former  palaces  of  grand 
dukes  has  a  symbolical  and  spectacular  effect. 
The  idea  of  the  proletariat  living  in  Park  Lane 
appeals  to  the  imagination.  But  all  the  prole- 
tariat cannot  live  in  Park  Lane,  or  even  in  Mayfair 


LIBERTARIAN  SOCIALISM  127 

and  Belgravia,  and  there  is  no  particular  reason 
why  Mr  Smith  should  live  rent  free  in  Park  Lane 
and  Mr  Brown  remain  in  Hackney.  That  would 
merely  mean  that  Mr  Smith  enjoyed  a  much 
larger  share  of  the  economic  rent  than  Mr  Brown. 
Even  in  a  Socialist  society,  all  sites,  all  neighbour- 
hoods and  all  houses  cannot  be  equally  desirable 
from  every  point  of  view.  What  possible  way  is 
there  of  allotting  them  justly  ?  The  only  rational 
method  is  that  of  charging  the  economic  rent. 
Those  that  are  willing  to  pay  the  most  will  have  the 
first  choice.  It  is  not,  perhaps,  a  perfect  system, 
but  it  is  the  only  practical  one.  Perfection  is 
unattainable  in  this  world.  Of  course,  as  a  tem- 
porary measure,  immediately  after  a  social  revolu- 
tion, or  even  before  it,  less  than  the  actual  economic 
rent  might  be  charged  to  provide  decent  homes 
for  the  too  numerous  families  that  have  none  at 
present  in  big  houses  now  occupied  by  single 
families.  But  some  rent  should  always  be  charged. 
The  economic  rent  should  be  the  property  of  the 
whole  community,  whose  collective  labour  creates 
the  value  of  the  land,  and  all  the  individual  members 
of  the  community  should  have  an  equal  share  of 
it.  They  can  have  it  only  if  the  economic  rent  is 
charged.  The  Russian  system,  which  seems  at 
first  sight  so  egalitarian,  is  in  fact  a  system  of 
privilege.  I  suspect  that  the  friends  of  the  Com- 
munist officials  get  the  first  choice  of  houses. 


128    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

Agricultural,  like  urban,  land  should  in  a  liber- 
tarian Socialist  society  be  rented  by  the  community 
either  to  associations  or  individuals.  Since  most 
forms  of  agriculture  in  modern  conditions  are  best 
conducted  on  a  large  scale,  no  doubt  the  greater 
part  of  agriculture  would  be  in  the  hands  of  unions 
of  agriculturists.  But  certain  forms  of  agriculture, 
such  as  wine-growing  and  nursery-gardening — par- 
ticularly the  latter — can  be  as  well  or  better  managed 
on  a  smaller  scale.  Anybody  that  has  lived  both  in 
Paris  and  London  knows  the  difference  between  the 
garden  peas  from  the  small  nursery-gardens  close 
to  Paris  and  the  field  peas  that  one  almost  always 
gets  in  London.  Intensive  culture  makes  it  possible 
for  the  French  nursery-gardeners  to  pay  the  high 
rents  obtained  for  land  near  a  large  town.  I  see 
no  reason  why  an  individual  should  not  rent  land 
in  a  Socialist  society  and  cultivate  it  for  his  own 
benefit  in  any  way  he  pleases.  It  is  improbable 
that  he  would  be  able  to  compete  successfully  with 
co-operative  large-scale  agriculture  in  growing 
cereals,  for  example,  but,  if  he  could,  why  not  ? 
He  must  not  be  allowed  to  exploit  his  own  family,  as 
the  French  peasant  farmers  do,  but  I  see  no  objec- 
tion to  his  employing  other  people,  if  he  needs  help 
and  can  find  it.  He  would  not  be  able  to  find  it, 
unless  the  conditions  that  he  offered  were  at  least 
as  good  as  people  could  get  for  themselves  by 
cultivating  land  on  their  own  account,  or  as  members 


LIBERTARIAN  SOCIALISM  129 

of  an  agricultural  union.  The  persons  employed 
would  not  form  a  proletariat,  since  they  would 
not  be  in  the  position  of  being  able  to  find  work 
only  so  far  as  the  work  is  profitable  to  an  employer. 
They  would  be  employed  by  their  own  free  choice 
because  they  preferred  it.  If  it  were  easy  for 
cultivators  to  find  persons  willing  to  be  employed, 
that  would  mean  that  the  system  of  individual 
cultivation  worked  better  than  co-operative  large- 
scale  agriculture,  for  it  would  mean  that  the 
individual  cultivator  could  offer  better  conditions 
than  a  man  would  get  by  joining  in  co-operative 
agriculture.  I  think  it  most  unlikely — indeed  almost 
impossible — that  that  would  happen,  but,  if  it  did 
happen,  nothing  should  be  done  to  prevent  it. 
For,  if  individual  cultivation  worked  better  than 
co  -  operative  large-scale  agriculture,  it  should 
survive.  Socialism  is  a  hypothesis  to  be  tested, 
not  a  dogma  to  be  imposed,  and  its  validity  can  be 
tested  only  by  its  working. 

The  Guild  Socialist  theory  is  perhaps  rather 
unfortunately  named,  for  its  title  has  a  medisevalist 
flavour.  This  has  probably  prevented  it  from 
receiving  as  much  attention  as  it  deserves,  par- 
ticularly on  the  Continent,  where  it  is  almost 
unknown.  But  the  "  guilds  "  of  Guild  Socialism 
are  very  unlike  the  mediaeval  gilds  ;  they  are, 
in  fact,  Trade  Unions  controlling  production. 
The  proposed  organisation  of  the  guilds  is  federal. 

I 


130    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

Each  factory  would  be  "to  the  fullest  extent  con- 
sistent with  the  character  of  its  service  a  self- 
governing  unit,  managing  its  own  productive 
operations  and  free  to  experiment  to  the  heart's 
content  in  new  methods,  to  develop  new  styles 
and  products,  and  to  adapt  itself  to  the  peculiar- 
ities of  a  local  or  individual  market."  The  local 
guilds  would  be  federated  in  regional  and  national 
organisations,  whose  duties  "would  be  mainly  those 
of  co-ordination,  of  regulation,  and  of  represent- 
ing the  guild  in  its  external  relations."  For  a  full 
account  of  the  Guild  Socialist  system  I  must  refer 
the  reader  to  Mr  Cole's  valuable  books,  especially  the 
latest,  Guild  Socialism  Restated,  from  which  I  have 
just  quoted.  I  cannot  here  attempt  a  detailed 
appreciation  of  Mr  Cole's  proposals.  Indeed,  I  can 
do  little  more  than  mention  the  points  as  to  which 
I  differ  from  him  and  give  my  reasons  for  differing. 
That  is  not  because  I  do  not  appreciate  the  value  of 
Mr  Cole's  contribution  to  the  discussion  of  Socialist 
theory,  but  merely  for  reasons  of  space.  In  my 
opinion,  few  writers  on  Socialism  since  Marx  and 
Engels  have  made  so  valuable  a  contribution  to  that 
discussion  as  he. 

If  Mr  Cole  had  done  nothing  more  than  initiate 
the  idea  of  functional  representation,  he  would 
deserve  our  gratitude.  For  functional  representa- 
tion, as  I  have  already  said,  is,  in  my  opinion, 
the  solution  of  the  problem  of  democracy.  It 
corrects  the  fundamental  vice  of  democratism  and 


LIBERTARIAN  SOCIALISM  131 

of  all  Socialist  systems  hitherto  proposed,  including 
even  the  Syndicalist  system  and  that  of  the  Paris 
Commune,  namely  the  concentration  of  all  functions 
in  the  hands  of  omni-competent  representatives. 

As  the  quotations  just  given  will  have  shown,  the 
Guild  Socialist  system  has  the  great  advantage  of 
being  decentralising.  Centralisation  is  the  great 
danger  of  every  other  form  of  Socialism.  A  system 
of  centralised  Socialism  may  not  be  etatiste  in  theory, 
but  it  will  inevitably  end  in  the  restoration  of  the 
State.  That  is  one  of  the  chief  objections  to  pure 
Marxism,  as  Bakunin  recognised.  Centralisation 
makes  a  strong  central  Government  necessary,  and  a 
strong  central  Government  is  a  State.  This  was 
understood  by  the  Communards  in  1871,  who  were 
right  in  taking  the  Commune  as  the  unit  instead  of 
the  nation,  but  mistaken  in  proposing  to  entrust  all 
functions  to  a  single  representative  body.  Mr 
Cole  follows  the  Communards  in  the  former  respect, 
but  avoids  their  mistake.  His  proposed  system 
of  communal  federal  organisation,  with  direct 
election  only  for  the  representatives  of  the  small 
units,  who  would  send  delegates  to  the  regional 
and  national  bodies,  seems  to  me  excellent,  safe- 
guarded as  it  is  by  the  right  of  recalling  represen- 
tatives. His  proposals  for  the  administration  of 
what  he  calls  the  "  civic  services  " — education, 
public  health,  and  so  on — appeal  to  me  equally 
strongly,  and  there  is  no  objection  from  the  liber- 


132    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

tarian  point  of  view  to  entrusting  distribution 
to  the  co-operative  societies,  except  in  the  case 
of  what  Mr  Cole  calls  "  collective  consumption," 
for  which  "  Collective  Utilities  Councils  "  are  pro- 
posed. For  Mr  Cole  proposes  to  give  no  monopoly 
to  the  co-operative  societies  and  would  allow  the 
small  tradesman  to  survive  if  he  can.  If  he  can, 
that  will  prove  that  he  fulfils  a  useful  function. 
Probably  the  survivals  would  be  limited  to  certain 
special  categories. 

The  greatest  advantage  of  Guild  Socialism,  as 
compared  with  other  Socialist  systems — in  par- 
ticular,  pure  Marxism — is  that  it  involves  no 
'monopoly  at  all,  except  in  the  very  few  cases  where 
it  is  unavoidable,  such  as  railways  or  mines.  The 
guild  system  is  not  put  forward,  as  Marxist  Com- 
munism is  by  its  dogmatic  apostles,  as  the  one  and 
only  possible  system,  to  be  imposed  everywhere 
without  regard  to  local  conditions.  Mr  Cole  no 
doubt  contemplates  the  guild  organisation  as  the 
normal  system  for  the  principal  industries,  but  he 
allows  the  existence  of  several  regional  or  local 
guilds  in  the  same  industry  and  of  independent 
factories  outside  the  national  guild  of  their  par- 
ticular industry.  Moreover,  he  proposes  to  "  let 
alone  and  leave  with  the  greatest  possible  freedom 
of  development  the  small  independent  producer  or 
Tenderer  of  service."  These  proposals  safeguard 
personal  liberty  and  prevent  monopoly — that  rock 


LIBERTARIAN  SOCIALISM  133 

on  which  many  Socialist  systems  would  split. 
Nobody  would  be  obliged  to  join  a  guild,  and  the 
ideal  of  libertarian  Socialism — voluntary  associa- 
tion— would  be  attained.  Human  solidarity  is  a 
fact.  It  arises,  in  the  words  of  M.  Henri  Lambert, 
"  not  only  from  interdependence  in  the  division  of 
labour  and  the  exchange  of  services,  but  from  a 
common  insecurity  and  powerlessness  in  the  pre- 
sence of  Nature,  which  has  to  be  dominated  and  con- 
quered." *  But  it  should  be  left  to  natural  causes 
to  produce  solidarity.  Voluntary  co-operation  is  an 
essential  condition  of  progress.  A  forced  solidarity 
would  be  an  obstacle  to  progress. 

The  most  important  difference  between  Guild 
Socialism  and  Syndicalism  is  that,  under  the 
Guild  Socialist  system,  the  means  of  production 
would  all  be  the  property  of  the  community  as 
a  whole,  which  would  entrust  the  various  guilds  or 
associations  of  workers  with  the  management  and 
control  of  industries  for  the  public  benefit,  whereas 
Syndicalism  would  make  the  means  of  production, 
other  than  land,  the  property  of  the  respective 
associations  of  workers  themselves.  It  is  some- 
times said  that  this  is  not  Socialism,  but  the  means 
of  production  are  socialised,  whether  their  collective 
owners  are  a  geographical  or  an  industrial  group. 
In  my  opinion,  the  Syndicalist  system  is  to  be 

*  Le  Nouveau  Contrat  Social,  p.  200.  Brussels  :  Maurice 
Lamertin  ;  Paris  :  Felix  Alcan,  1920. 


134    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 


preferred  in  this  respect,  except  for  public  services, 
natural  monopolies,  and  the  banking  and  credit 
system,  which  may  be  considered  a  public  service 
and  is  already  almost  a  monopoly.  A  banking 
guild  working  on  its  own  account  would  be  too 
powerful.  The  public  services  would  include  rail- 
ways and  all  other  forms  of  transport,  posts,  tele- 
graphs, telephones,  and  all  that  comes  within  the 
category  of  what  Mr  Cole  calls  "  collective  consump- 
tion." For  all  these  the  guild  system  would  be  more 
satisfactory  than  that  of  "  industrialised  national- 
isation "  in  a  Socialist  society,  for  due  provision 
is  made  for  giving  the  consumers  the  necessary 
voice  in  their  control.  But  for  ordinary  industry 
the  actual  ownership  of  the  industries  by  the 
workers  in  them  would  have  the  advantage  of  pro- 
viding an  economic  incentive.  Under  the  system  of 
public  ownership  the  workers  would  be  paid  fixed 
salaries,  the  amount  of  which  would  not  depend 
on  the  output  or  the  success  of  the  enterprise. 
Under  the  system  of  ownership  by  the  particular 
workers  themselves  their  earnings  would  depend 
to  some  extent  on  output  and  the  success  of  the 
enterprise.  I  believe  this  to  be  of  supreme  import- 
ance. The  strengthening  of  the  economic  incentive 
is,  I  am  convinced,  the  only  method  of  averting  the 
danger  of  a  diminution  of  production  following  a 
social  revolution.  Provided  that  the  guilds  or 
associations  of  workers  had  no  monopoly — and 


LIBERTARIAN  SOCIALISM  135 

they  would  have  none  in  the  conditions  proposed 
by  Mr  Cole — there  would  be  no  danger  in  giving 
them  the  absolute  ownership  of  industry. 

In  collective  production  different  salaries  may  be 
paid  for  different  kinds  of  work,  but  it  is  difficult  to 
differentiate  between  individuals  doing  the  same 
kind  of  work,  except  by  the  system  of  piecework, 
which  is  not  possible  in  all  trades  and  is  perhaps 
undesirable  in  any.  In  the  capitalist  system, 
therefore,  the  economic  incentive  scarcely  exists 
for  the  individual  workman  and  that  is  one  reason 
why  that  system  is  breaking  down.  Workmen  are 
getting  tired  of  producing  to  make  profits  for  their 
employers.  Many  Socialists  think  that  they  will 
be  more  willing  to  produce  for  the  benefit  of  the 
community.  I  doubt  it  very  much.  They  want 
to  produce  for  themselves.  If  the  workers  in  a 
factory  or  the  members  of  a  guild  owned  the  factory 
in  which  they  worked,  even  if  all  the  workers  of  a 
particular  category  were  paid  the  same  salaries 
on  account,  and  even  if  they  all  had  the  same  share 
of  the  surplus,  they  would  have  individually  a 
strong  economic  incentive  in  the  fact  that,  the 
greater  the  success  of  the  enterprise,  the  more  there 
would  be  to  divide.  I  am  convinced  that  produc- 
tion would  benefit  both  in  quality  and  quantity. 
There  would  be  a  healthy  competition,  which  will 
just  be  as  necessary  in  a  Socialist  society  as  in  any 
other.  There  is  no  necessary  opposition  between 


136    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

co-operation  and  competition  ;  there  can  be  com- 
petition between  groups  as  between  individuals. 
And  there  will  always  be  competition,  except  in  a 
system  of  universal  monopoly.  Even  if  prices 
were  fixed,  there  would  be  competition  of  quality. 

I  am  far  from  saying  that  human  nature  can 
never  be  modified.  It  has  been  modified  in  the 
past  by  economic  conditions,  by  climate,  by  general 
environment  and  other  factors,  and  no  doubt  will 
be  in  the  future.  But  there  are  certain  funda- 
mental instincts  in  human  nature  that  seem 
unlikely  to  be  modified.  It  seems  likely  that  self- 
interest  will  always  be  the  chief  motive  of  human 
conduct.  At  any  rate,  it  is  at  present  and,  so  far 
as  we  can  judge  from  what  we  know  of  history, 
always  has  been.  So  innate  is  self-interest  in 
human  nature  that  it  is  difficult  to  say  where  it 
begins  and  ends ;  there  is  an  element  of  self- 
interest  even  in  what  seems  the  purest  altruism. 
Nor  is  self-interest  ultimately  detrimental  to  the 
general  interest,  provided  it  be  enlightened.  Un- 
enlightened self-interest  is  a  form  of  stupidity  and 
all  forms  of  stupidity  are  detrimental  to  the  general 
interest.  We  can,  I  think,  rely  on  enlightened 
self-interest  to  produce  a  sufficient  amount  of 
civism.  To  take  a  homely  example  :  if  one  is  in  a 
hurry  to  catch  a  train  and  one's  taxi  is  held  up, 
one  is  inclined  in  the  moment  of  irritation  to  curse 
the  regulation  of  the  traffic.  But  everybody 


LIBERTARIAN  SOCIALISM  137 

recognises  in  his  calmer  moments  that,  if  the  traffic 
were  not  regulated,  nobody  would  catch  a  train 
at  all,  except  by  starting  an  hour  earlier  than  at 
present.  That  is  enlightened  self-interest.  It 
works  better  on  the  whole  than  altruism,  for, 
being  based  on  reason,  it  is  more  dependable. 

We  can  base  society  only  on  human  nature  as 
it  is  at  present — not  on  human  nature  as  it  may 
possibly  become.  And  it  is  safer  to  allow  rather 
for  the  weaknesses  of  human  nature  than  for  its 
qualities.  Nothing  could  be  more  foolish  than  to 
base  a  social  order  on  the  assumption  of  an  exalted 
altruism  or  a  probably  impossible  perfectibility. 
If  Socialist  conditions  improve  human  nature,  so 
much  the  better,  but  it  would  be  courting  disaster 
to  assume  that  they  will.  We  may  hope  that  the 
spirit  of  civism  will  be  so  strengthened  that  people 
will  all  do  their  best  for  the  public  benefit,  even 
though  they  are  no  better  off  themselves  than  if 
they  did  their  worst,  but  it  would  be  fatal  to  assume 
that.  We  must  assume  the  contrary.  Then,  if 
the  assumption  turns  out  to  be  mistaken,  so  much 
the  better.  Whereas,  if  we  make  the  other 
assumption  and  it  turns  out  to  be  mistaken,  our 
whole  system  will  be  ruined. 

All  business  men  know  that  people  as  a  rule 
work  better  when  they  are  "  interested,"  as  the 
phrase  goes.  If  manufacturers  and  shopkeepers  give 
commissions  on  sales  to  their  salesmen,  it  is  because 


138    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

they  have  found  by  experience  that  the  system 
increases  the  sales.  The  output  of  coal  increased 
when  an  arrangement  was  made  by  which  its 
increase  led  to  a  corresponding  increase  in  the 
miners'  wages.  That  seems  to  shock  some  people, 
but  I  doubt  the  sincerity  of  their  scruples.  It  seems 
to  me  quite  natural.  The  negative  evidence  of 
the  opposite  system  is  still  more  convincing.  Few 
would  maintain  that  the  efficiency  of  Government 
departments  is  increased  by  the  system  of  promo- 
tion by  seniority  rather  than  by  merit,  of  salaries 
rising  by  regular  stages,  and  security  of  tenure. 
When  it  comes  to  a  State  monopoly,  like  the  French 
monopolies  in  tobacco  and  matches,  it  makes  no 
difference  to  anybody  engaged  in  the  manufacture 
whether  the  article  manufactured  is  good  or  bad, 
it  is  nobody's  interest  to  search  for  new  methods 
or  styles — and  the  results  are  known  to  every  visitor 
to  France.  All  experience  shows  the  necessity  of 
the  economic  incentive,  especially  the  experience 
of  those  cases  where  it  does  not  exist. 

In  this  connection  the  eternal  question  is  raised 
whether  equal  incomes  are  desirable  or  possible 
in  a  Socialist  society.  Mr  Cole  agrees  with  Mr 
Bernard  Shaw  that  they  are,  but  for  him  they 
are  only  an  ideal  that  will  become  possible  "  only  in 
the  atmosphere  of  a  free  society,  and  even  then 
only  by  a  gradual  process."  He  expressly  says 
that  a  Socialist  society  cannot  begin  with  equal 


LIBERTARIAN  SOCIALISM  139 

incomes.  That  is  enough  :  we  need  not  quarrel 
about  the  possibilities  of  a  remote  future.  For  my 
part,  a  system  of  equal  incomes  does  not  appeal 
to  me  even  as  an  ideal.  I  feel  in  no  way  injured  by 
the  fact  that  Mr  Bernard  Shaw  and  Mr  H.  G.  Wells, 
for  instance,  earn  far  more  by  their  pens  than  I  do. 
It  seems  to  me  quite  natural  and  just.  What  is 
neither  just  nor  natural  is  that  a  gentleman  may 
have  a  much  larger  income  than  Mr  Shaw  or  Mr 
Wells,  or  perhaps  even  than  Edison  or  Marconi, 
merely  because  his  grandfather  made  a  corner  in 
hairpins.  My  experience  is  that  most  people 
agree  with  me.  They  see  no  objection  to  inequality 
of  income,  provided  that  it  is  not  too  great,  that 
the  smallest  incomes  are  adequate  to  secure  decent 
comfort,  and  that  the  larger  ones  appear  to  be 
deserved.  I  do  not  believe  that  the  ideal  of  equal 
incomes  makes  any  wide  appeal. 

There  is  a  famous  Communist  maxim  :  "  From 
each  according  to  his  abilities ;  to  each  according 
to  his  needs."  It  sounds  very  well  in  a  public 
speech,  but  I  should  like  to  know  what  it  means. 
Literally,  it  should  mean  that  everybody  should  be 
allowed  to  take  whatever  he  likes  out  of  the  common 
stock.  That  would  hardly  work,  even  in  a  family, 
still  less  in  a  larger  community.  Such  a  system 
indeed  ignores  fundamental  tendencies  of  human 
nature* ;  it  might  do  for  angels.  If  the  maxim  does 
not  mean  that,  it  means  nothing — and  that  is  the 


140    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

more  probable  hypothesis.  M.  Henri  Lambert 
suggests  a  maxim  that  approaches  more  nearly  to 
justice  :  "  To  each  according  to  his  services."  I 
say  no  more  than  "  approaches  more  nearly  to 
justice,"  for  absolute  justice  is  unattainable  in 
a  relative  world.  Of  course  it  is  impossible  to 
estimate  the  money  value  of  the  various  services 
rendered  by  each  individual  to  the  community. 
In  practice,  the  maxim  will  mean :  "To  each 
according  to  the  value  that  the  public  puts  on  his 
services."  It  will  be  to  a  great  extent  a  question 
of  supply  and  demand.  If  cinematographs  are 
still  popular  in  a  Socialist  society  and  there  is  only 
one  Charlie  Chaplin,  no  doubt  he  will  earn  a  larger 
income  than  many  persons  whose  services  are  more 
useful  to  society — although,  for  my  part,  I  refuse 
to  admit  that  so  great  an  artist  is  not  useful  to 
society.  But  that  does  not  seem  to  me  to  matter. 
The  important  thing  is  that  nobody  should  exploit 
anybody  else,  and  Charlie  Chaplin  exploits  nobody. 
I  do  not  envy  him  his  large  income,  to  which  I  have 
contributed  an  infinitesimal  fraction. 

The  disastrous  consequences  of  the  Russian 
attempt  to  pay  everybody  the  same  income  are 
only  what  might  have  been  anticipated.  It  is 
true  that  self-interest  does  not  always  take  the  form 
of  a  desire  to  make  money.  For  some  people  there 
are  stronger  motives,  such  as  ambition,  or  love  of 
the  work  for  its  own  sake.  But  the  work  that 


LIBERTARIAN  SOCIALISM  141 

people  love  for  its  own  sake  is  usually  a  pleasant  or 
very  interesting  kind  of  work — very  often  the 
work  by  which  they  do  not  earn  their  living. 
Even  in  a  society  with  equal  incomes  there  would 
be  no  lack  of  artists,  or  writers,  or  inventors,  or 
men  of  science — there  might  even  still  be  too  many 
artists — but  there  would  probably  be  a  serious  lack 
of  road-sweepers  and  coal-miners.  Nobody  would 
do  disagreeable  or  monotonous  work  and  industrial 
conscription  would  become  necessary.  That,  too, 
has  been  tried  in  Russia,  with  what  results  we  have 
seen.  No  doubt  some  of  the  actually  disagreeable 
work  could  be  dispensed  with  and  some  done  by 
machinery,  when  human  labour  was  no  longer 
cheaper  than  machinery.  But  some  would  always 
remain,  as  well  as  a  large  amount  of  monotonous 
and  purely  mechanical  work.  Mr  Cole  proposes 
special  attractions,  such  as  shorter  hours,  or  six 
months'  holiday  in  the  year.  But  a  man  paid  a 
twelve  months'  salary  for  six  months'  work  would 
in  fact  be  more  highly  paid,  and,  in  a  system 
of  Guild  Socialism  such  as  Mr  Cole  proposes,  I  see 
nothing  to  prevent  him  from  doing  work  on  his 
own  account  during  his  holidays  and  thus  earning 
more  money.  In  a  Socialist  society  the  dis- 
agreeable work  will  have  to  be  particularly  highly 
paid,  or  it  will  not  be  done  at  all ;  and  after  all  that 
is  only  just. 

Mr  Cole  proposes  that  the  allocation  of  capital 


142    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

should  be  a  matter  for  the  Commune.  This  pro- 
posal would  necessarily  be  modified  if  the  Guild 
Socialist  system  were  modified,  as  I  have  suggested, 
by  giving  the  ownership  of  ordinary  industries  to 
the  respective  groups  of  workers.  Each  group 
would  naturally  decide  the  question  of  allocating 
capital  for  future  production  and  the  Commune, 
"  either  locally,  regionally,  or  nationally,"  would 
deal  only  with  the  capital  required  for  the  public 
services  and  natural  monopolies. 

One  of  the  gravest  objections  that  I  have  to 
make  to  the  Guild  Socialist  proposals  concerns  the 
fixing  of  prices.  As  I  understand  it,  all  prices  are  to 
be  fixed  by  agreement  between  the  various  organisa- 
tions concerned,  with  an  appeal  to  the  Commune  in 
case  of  disagreement.  Mr  Cole  takes  as  an  example 
the  price  of  milk,  but  it  is  comparatively  easy  to 
fix  the  price  of  milk.  It  is  quite  another  matter 
to  fix  the  price  of  everything.  The  attempts  made 
during  the  War  failed,  except  in  the  simplest  cases, 
such  as  bread,  milk  and  coal.  In  Paris  different 
prices  were  fixed,  according  to  quality,  for  meat, 
butter  and  some  other  articles  of  food.  The  natural 
consequence  was  that  no  shop  ever  had  any  but 
the  best  quality — at  the  maximum  price.  Co- 
operative societies  in  a  socialist  order  might  be 
more  honest  than  are  individual  tradesmen,  but  we 
had  better  not  count  on  it.  Prices  of  many  things 
must  necessarily  vary  continually,  even  in  a  Socialist 


LIBERTARIAN  SOCIALISM  143 

society,  for  they  depend  on  varying  conditions. 
They  would,  therefore,  have  to  be  fixed  at  very 
frequent  intervals.  I  cannot  think  that  the  Guild 
Socialists  have  realised  what  the  fixing  of  all  prices 
means.  It  would  take  the  whole  time  of  an  army 
of  functionaries  and  then  it  would  be  so  badly  done 
that  it  would  satisfy  nobody.  It  could  not  be  well 
done,  for  it  is  an  impossible  task. 

The  question  of  prices  would  not  arise  if,  as  the 
Communist  Manifesto  says,  selling  and  buying  are 
to  disappear.  But  selling  and  buying  can  never  dis- 
appear, unless  we  return  to  primitive  Communism 
and  dole  out  rations  of  everything  to  everybody. 
Even  then,  selling  and  buying  would  not  really 
disappear,  for,  since  one  person  would  get,  for 
instance,  more  bread  than  he  wanted  and  too  little 
sugar,  he  would  barter  some  of  his  bread  for  the 
surplus  sugar  of  a  large  bread-eater  with  a  less 
sweet  tooth.  And  barter  is  the  primitive  form 
of  selling  and  buying.  The  distribution  of  what  we 
call  luxuries,  because  they  are  scarce,  would  be  a 
little  difficult  in  such  a  system,  for  there  would 
never  be  enough  to  go  round.  The  only  method 
that  I  can  think  of  would  be  to  dole  them  out  in 
turn.  Then  the  teetotaller  would  get  one  day  a 
bottle  of  Cliambertin  and  the  non-smoker  a  dozen 
Havana  cigars,  and  the  barter  would  begin  again. 
The  teetotaller  might  barter  his  bottle  of  Chambertin 
for  a  lobster  with  a  man  to  whom  lobster  invariably 


144    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

gave  indigestion.  I  do  not  know  whether  anybody 
seriously  proposes  such  a  return  to  primitive 
barbarism.  If  not,  selling  and  buying  are  inevit- 
able. Even  if  all  incomes  were  equal  and  there 
were  no  currency  in  the  proper  sense  of  the  term, 
we  should  all  have  to  be  given  coupons  of  some 
sort,  representing  our  claim  on  the  national  produc- 
tion, and  there  would  have  to  be  some  measure  of 
value.  It  would  be  impossible  to  issue  coupons 
entitling  people  to  so  much  cloth,  woollen,  silk  or 
other  material,  so  much  tobacco,  so  many  tea-cups, 
and  so  on,  without  regard  to  value.  The  selling 
might  be  a  State  or  a  communal  monopoly,  but  it 
would  still  be  selling,  even  if  prices  were  fixed  by 
regulation,  and  there  would  still  be  buying  on  the 
part  of  the  individuals.  It  is  impossible  to  escape 
from  selling  and  buying,  either  by  barter  or  by,  some 
more  civilised  method,  unless  and  until  each  person 
himself  produces  all  that  he  needs,  because  it  is 
impossible  to  escape  from  exchange.  And  why 
anybody  should  wish  to  escape  from  it  passes  my 
understanding. 

The  best  way  of  dealing  with  prices  is  to  leave 
them  to  supply  and  demand.  This  is  terribly 
bourgeois,  I  know,  for  it  means  free  trade,  free 
selling  and  buying,  those  bourgeois  theories  de- 
nounced by  the  Communist  Manifesto.  I  am  very 
sorry  but,  if  the  choice  has  to  be  made  between 
bourgeois  good  sense  and  proletarian  nonsense, 


LIBERTARIAN  SOCIALISM  145 

I  prefer  bourgeois  good  sense — and  vice  versa. 
The  law  of  supply  and  demand  is  no  more  anti- 
proletarian  than  the  law  of  gravitation  (with  what- 
ever modifications  modern  discovery  may  have 
made  necessary).  The  operation  of  supply  and 
demand  in  determining  "  values  "  is  a  fact.  It 
is  always  unwise  to  ignore  facts.  I  see  that  Marx's 
latest  biographer  says  that  "  Marx's  theory  of  value 
and  surplus  value  has  rather  the  significance  of  a 
proletarian  slogan  than  of  an  economic  truth." 
That  is  discreetly  and  politely  put.  However  useful 
proletarian  slogans  may  be  for  revolutionary  pro- 
paganda, they  are  unsafe  foundations  for  an 
economic  system.  There  is,  in  fact,  no  way  of 
determining  the  value  of  anything  except  the  old 
way  of  discovering  how  much  people  are  prepared 
to  pay  for  it. 

The  Guild  Socialists  hanker  after  the  "  just 
price."  It  was  defined  by  mediaeval  moral  theolo- 
gians as  a  price  which,  after  repaying  the  producer 
the  cost  of  raw  material  and  production,  would 
give  him  a  just  return  for  his  labour.  But  who  on 
earth  can  decide  what  is  a  just  return  for  the 
labour  expended  by  a  particular  individual  on 
producing  a  particular  article  ?  Moreover,  the 
attempt  is  futile,  for  if  nobody  wants  the  article 
produced,  the  producer  must  be  content  with  the 
honour  of  having  produced  it  as  the  only  return 
for  his  labour.  A  man  might  spend  months  on 

K 


146    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

producing  a  perfectly  useless  object  that  nobody 
wanted — people  have  often  spent  even  years  on 
such  a  task — but  the  fact  that  he  had  done  so 
would  not  give  it  any  value.  The  "  just  price  " 
was,  of  course,  purely  theoretical,  even  in  the  Middle 
Ages,  when  prices  were  determined  to  a  great 
extent  by  supply  and  demand,  just  as  they  are  now, 
always  have  been,  and  always  will  be,  although  the 
operation  of  supply  and  demand  was  limited  by 
restrictions  and  quasi-monopolies. 

The  "  just  price  "  of  the  Guild  Socialists  is  not 
that  of  the  mediaeval  moral  theologians  ;  Mr  Cole 
defines  it  as  "a  price  satisfactory  to  the  social 
sense  of  the  community."  I  confess  that  I  have 
no  idea  what  that  means.  The  price  most  satis- 
factory to  individuals  is  the  lowest  possible  price 
and  that  is  likely  always  to  be  the  case.  The  only 
sense  that  I  can  give  to  the  phrase  "  a  price  satis- 
factory to  the  social  sense  of  the  community" 
is  a  price  that  people  are  willing  to  pay.  If  they 
can  possibly  go  without  the  particular  article, 
they  will  refuse  to  pay  more ;  if  they  cannot 
possibly  go  without  it,  they  will  probably  revolt  if 
they  are  asked  more.  It  seems  to  me  probable 
that  people  would  resent  much  more  a  price  that 
they  considered  too  high,  if  it  had  been  fixed  by 
regulation,  than  if  it  were  the  result  of  the  operation 
of  supply  and  demand.  That  was,  indeed,  the  case 
during  the  War.  The  fixed  price  might  in  fact 


LIBERTARIAN  SOCIALISM  147 

be  the  lowest  possible  price  in  the  circumstances, 
but  it  would  be  very  difficult  to  convince  people 
of  that,  and  the  attempt  would  involve  endless  con- 
troversies with  conflicting  statistics.  I  do  not  envy 
the  members  of  the  bodies  that  had  the  duty  of 
fixing  prices  ;  they  would  be  the  most  unpopular 
people  in  the  country.  It  is  probable  that  sooner 
or  later  it  would  be  impossible  to  find  anybody 
willing  to  undertake  the  duty. 

It  is  not  difficult  to  find  examples  of  the  impossi- 
bility of  deciding  what  is  a  "  just  price."  Two 
painters  spend  exactly  the  same  amount  of  time 
in  painting  each  a  picture,  on  which  each  of  them 
has  expended  exactly  the  same  sum  for  canvas, 
brushes  and  paint.  But  one  picture  is  a  great 
work  of  art  and  the  other  is  a  daub.  According 
to  the  mediaeval  moral  theologians  the  "  just  price  " 
of  both  pictures  is  the  same,  but,  if  the  price  of 
both  pictures  were  fixed  at  the  same  amount, 
it  is  probable  that  one  painter  would  sell  his  picture 
and  the  other  would  have  to  keep  his  ;  because  in 
fact  it  has  no  value  at  all,  not  even  the  small  value 
of  the  raw  materials,  which  have  been  wasted. 
For  nobody  wants  it.  It  might  happen,  on  the 
other  hand  that,  although  one  picture  was  a  great 
work  of  art  and  the  other  had  no  real  artistic 
value,  the  latter  was  not  just  an  incompetent  daub, 
but  a  showy  painting  of  an  attractive  subject 
executed  with  a  certain  amount  of  technical  skill. 


148    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

In  that  case,  many  more  people  might  want  the 
bad  picture  than  the  great  work  of  art.  Supposing 
that  the  persons  called  upon  to  fix  for  each  picture 
"  a  price  satisfactory  to  the  social  sense  of  the 
community "  happened  to  be  connoisseurs  of 
painting,  they  would  be  in  rather  a  dilemma.  For, 
according  to  "  the  social  sense  of  the  community," 
they  should  fix  a  higher  price  for  the  bad  picture 
than  for  the  great  work  of  art,  whereas  their  own 
artistic  consciences  would  compel  them  to  the 
opposite  course.  We  come  back  to  this  :  that  the 
commercial,  as  distinct  from  the  artistic,  value  of  a 
picture  is  what  it  will  fetch  and  there  is  no  other 
possible  criterion.  Since  people  can,  after  all,  do 
without  pictures,  they  will  never  consent  to  pay 
for  them  more  than  they  are  worth  to  them,  in 
their  opinion. 

Perhaps  Guild  Socialists  may  object  to  the  choice 
of  pictures  as  an  example.  It  may  be  that  they 
would  exclude  works  of  art  from  the  general  rule 
that  prices  should  be  fixed.  Then  let  us  take 
another  example,  which  I  choose  because  it  shows 
very  clearly  that  the  only  practical  criterion  of 
price  is  supply  and  demand.  In  the  French 
department  of  Cote-d'Or,  on  the  slopes  of  the  hills 
between  Dijon  and  Chagny,  are  vineyards  covering 
a  relatively  small  area  which  produce  all  the  fine  red 
burgundies — Chambertin,  Romande-Conti,  Gorton, 
Musigny,  Clos-Vougeot,  Nuits,  Beaune,  Pommard, 


LIBERTARIAN  SOCIALISM  149 

Volnay  and  the  rest.  The  total  yield  of  the  area 
is  considerably  less  than  1  per  cent,  of  the  total 
yield  of  the  vineyards  of  France,  and  perhaps 
15  per  cent,  of  the  total  yield  of  Burgundy.  No 
doubt  the  economic  rent  of  the  area  in  question  is 
higher  than  that  of  the  other  Burgundy  vineyards  ; 
otherwise  the  cost  of  producing  a  bottle  of  Chamber- 
tin  or  Corton  and  tKe  labour  involved  are  no  more 
than  in  the  case  of  the  most  ordinary  burgundy. 
The  fine  quality  of  the  wines  grown  on  the  parti- 
cular area  mentioned  results  from  a  combination 
of  particular,  vines  with  the  peculiar  qualities  of  the 
soil.  The  same  vines  have  been  planted  in  many 
other  places  all  over  the  world,  but  it  has  never 
been  possible  to  produce  from  .them  the  same 
wines.  What  is  the  "  just  price  "  of  a  bottle  of 
one  of  these  fine  burgundies  ?  By  what  possible 
criterion  could  their  price  be  fixed  other  than  that 
of  supply  and  demand  ?  I  hope  that  there  will 
still  be  in  a  Socialist  society  persons  capable  of 
appreciating  a  Musigny  or  a  Romanee-Conti. 
Such  persons  will  have  to  go  without  something 
else  in  order  to  get  a  bottle  of  one  of  those  wines. 
The  price  of  the  wines  can  depend  on  nothing  else 
than  the  number  of  people  that  want  them  and  the 
sacrifices  that  they  are  prepared  to  make  to  get 
them. 

Fortunately,  tastes  differ  and  everybody  does  not 
want    the    same    luxuries.     A    fine    burgundy    or 


150    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

claret,  for  instance,  is  thrown  away  on  most  English- 
men, who  prefer  anything  that  is  fizzy.  But  it 
is  only  just  that  people  that  want  luxuries  should 
pay  for  them.  Naturally,  the  prices  of  all  luxuries 
will  necessarily  be  much  lower  in  a  Socialist  society 
than  they  are  now,  when  they  are  kept  up  by  the 
fact  that  they  are  competed  for  by  people  with  more 
money  than  they  know  what  to  do  with.  They 
will  depend  on  the  amount  of  individual  incomes 
and  on  the  surplus  of  the  respective  incomes  that 
remains  after  the  necessaries  of  life  have  been  pro- 
vided for.  Suppose,  for  example,  that  the  average 
family  income  were  £500  a  year,  and  nobody  had 
more  than  £2000 — the  figures  are,  of  course,  quite 
arbitrary  and  not  intended  as  a  forecast — it 
would  be  difficult  for  anybody  to  spend  on  a  picture 
more  than  £200,  the  maximum  price  that  Jean- 
Fran9ois  Millet  declared  any  picture  to  be  worth, 
and  nobody  would  be  likely  to  give  two  guineas 
a  bottle  for  champagne.  The  better  wealth  is 
divided,  the  more  easy  will  it  become  for  every- 
body to  have  some  luxury,  and  the  more  difficult 
for  anybody  to  have  too  many  luxuries.  As  for 
the  necessities  of  life,  there  is  no  reason  why 
their  prices  too  should  not  be  left  to  the  operation 
of  natural  causes.  The  most  just  price  is  that 
determined  by  supply  and  demand,  since  it  is  in 
fact  determined  by  the  mutual  service  rendered  to 
each  other  by  the  buyer  and  seller. 


LIBERTARIAN  SOCIALISM  151 

A  very  strong  objection  to  fixing  prices  is  that, 
so  at  least  it  seems  to  me,  it  leaves  international 
trade  out  of  account.  We  shall  still  import  and 
export  in  a  Socialist  society;  indeed, it  is  to  be  hoped 
that  we  shall  import  and  export  more  than  ever, 
for  with  the  destruction  of  economic  and  political 
frontiers  each  administrative  area  will  produce 
only  what  its  natural  resources  and  conditions 
enable  it  to  produce  best  and  most  cheaply.  There 
would  be  an  end  of  industries  artificially  maintained 
by  protective  tariffs.  No  particular  region  would 
need  "  key  industries  "  to  provide  for  the  case  of 
war.  There  would,  for  example,  be  no  need  for 
England  to  grow  wheat  at  all  if  it  should  prove  to 
be  the  case — I  do  not  say  that  it  would — that 
enough  for  the  world  supply  could  be  grown  else- 
where more  cheaply  than  it  could  be  grown  in  this 
country.  And  the  fact  that  no  region  would  be 
able  to  supply  all  its  own  primary  needs  would 
itself  make  war  almost  impossible,  apart  from  other 
measures  for  preventing  it.  That  is  one  of  the 
reasons  why  universal  Free  Trade  is  an  essential 
condition  of  peace.  International  trade  would 
become  very  difficult  if  each  country  or  region  fixed 
its  own  prices.  In  a  system  of  Guild  Socialism, 
for  instance,  the  guilds  would  presumably  import 
and  export — that  is,  they  would  buy  from  and  sell 
to  individuals  or  associations  in  other  countries. 
Those  individuals  or  associations  could  not  be  made 


152    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

to  pay  the  fixed  prices.  The  guild  would  either 
have  to  treat  with  them  on  the  basis  of  supply  and 
demand,  or  do  no  business  with  them.  It  might 
happen — indeed,  nothing  could  be  more  probable — 
that  a  guild  would  be  obliged  to  sell  to  some 
person  or  association  in  France  or  Germany  at 
a  lower  price  than  that  fixed  for  the  particular 
article  in  this  country.  That  would  mean,  in 
effect,  a  protective  duty  at  the  expense  of  the  home 
consumer,  or,  if  you  like,  a  bounty  on  exports — it 
comes  to  the  same  thing.  Indeed,  fixing  prices 
would  in  itself  be  a  form  of  Protection,  if  it  were 
made  illegal  to  sell  even  below  the  fixed  price,  as 
presumably  it  would  be.  Inevitably,  we  should 
have  guilds  demanding  the  exclusion  of  imports, 
or  their  sale  at  a  higher  price  than  was  necessary, 
in  order  to  keep  up  the  price  of  the  home-produced 
article.  Protection  in  any  form  makes  inter- 
nationalism impossible.  Free  exchange  is  essential 
to  internationalism  and  free  exchange  is  incom- 
patible with  fixed  prices. 

It  is  strange  that,  whereas  Socialism  claims  to  be 
essentially  international,  so  many  proposed  Socialist 
systems  seem  to  assume  a  self-contained  country 
producing  all  that  it  needs.  In  a  strict  Communist 
society,  with  no  buying  and  selling  and  no  currency, 
I  do  not  know  how  international  trade  would  be 
conducted.  Presumably  by  barter.  A  return  to 
barter  would  not  be  progress,  but  reaction.  In  a 


LIBERTARIAN  SOCIALISM  153 

centralised  system  of  State  Socialism  the  Govern- 
ment would,  no  doubt,  have  a  monopoly  of  import 
and  export  trade,  but  it  would  have  to  have  some 
means  of  paying  for  what  it  bought,  unless  barter 
were  restored.  Such  a  Government  would  prob- 
ably be  intensely  Protectionist,  for  it  would  wish 
to  defend  its  own  monopolies  from  foreign  com- 
petition, especially  as  they  would  probably  be 
grossly  mismanaged  and  doing  very  badly.  A 
libertarian  Socialist  society  must  have  a  currency, 
as  the  Guild  Socialists  allow.  I  should  hope  that 
we  should  eventually  arrive  at  an  international  cur- 
rency, and  very  soon  at  one  for  the  whole  of  Europe. 
If  there  were  no  currency,  presumably,  as  has  been 
said,  incomes  would  be  paid  in  coupons  of  certain 
values,  for  there  must  be  a  standard  of  value  :  even 
if  there  were  no  currency,  we  should  have  to  talk 
as  if  there  were  one.  But,  unless  the  coupons 
were  international,  nobody  would  accept  them 
outside  the  country  of  issue.  And,  even  if  they 
were  international,  they  would  not  be  convenient 
means  of  exchange  for  international  trade,  if  their 
validity  were  of  limited  duration.  If  it  were  not, 
they  would  simply  be  a  paper  currency.  But,  of 
course,  international  trade  is  in  fact  worked  by  a 
credit  system — by  the  banks.  Credit  can  be 
measured  only  in  terms  of  currency.  But  there 
really  is  no  sort  of  reason  for  getting  rid  of  currency, 
since  no  other  method  of  exchange  could  possibly 


154    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

be  so  convenient.     It  is  for  those  that  propose  to 
get  rid  of  it  to  give  reasons  for  the  proposal. 

It  may  be  objected  that  a  man  might  save  up 
currency  and  start  as  an  employer  of  labour.  As  I 
have  said — and  in  this  regard  Guild  Socialists  agree 
with  me — there  is  no  reason  why  independent 
producers  should  not  continue  in  a  Socialist  society. 
A  small  tradesman,  if  such  survived,  or  a  craftsman 
or  owner  of  a  small  workshop,  might  wish  to  employ 
somebody  else  to  help  him.  But  what  has  already 
been  said  about  agriculture  applies  to  other  in- 
dustries. Nobody  would  consent  to  be  employed 
unless  he  got  at  least  as  good  terms  as  he  could  get 
for  himself  by  belonging  to  a  guild  or  union  of 
workers,  or  working  independently.  If  a  man 
could  find  plenty  of  people  willing  to  be 
employed,  that  could  only  mean  that  he  was 
able  to  pay  them  at  least  as  much  as — probably 
more  than — they  would  earn  for  themselves 
as  members  of  a  co-operative  undertaking.  And 
that  would  mean  that  co-operative  production  was 
less  successful  than  production  under  individual 
control.  I  believe  that  co-operative  production 
would  hold  it&  own  and  that  it  would  be  very 
difficult  indeed  to  find  anybody  willing  to  be 
employed  by  another  individual,  but,  if  that  be 
not  the  case,  co-operative  production  must  not  be 
artificially  bolstered  up. 

If  it  be  considered  dangerous  to  allow  anybody 


LIBERTARIAN  SOCIALISM  155 

that  had  saved  up  money  to  bequeath  it,  inherit- 
ance could  be  made  illegal,  except,  of  course,  in 
the  case  of  personal  effects,  such  as  furniture. 
But  the  inheritance  of  money  would  give  nobody 
any  ownership  of  the  means  of  production ;  he  would 
inherit  only  the  power  of  purchasing  products. 
Moreover,  incomes  are  unlikely  to  be  high  enough 
in  a  Socialist  society  to  leave  much  room  for  saving, 
and  the  incentive  to  saving  will  be  gone,  because  it 
will  have  become  unnecessary  to  provide  for  one's 
family.  People  might,  of  course,  lend  money  at 
interest,  whatever  might  be  the  form  of  currency, 
but  that  could  be  easily  discouraged  by  not  enforc- 
ing any  contract  of  the  kind.  If  people  chose  to 
lend  money  without  any  legal  means  of  securing 
its  repayment,  or  with  no  means  of  securing  the 
repayment  of  more  than  the  principal,  that  would  be 
their  affair  and  it  would  hurt  nobody. 

Such  are,  very  briefly  and  imperfectly  stated,  the 
main  lines  on  which,  in  my  opinion,  a  libertarian 
Socialist  society  should  be  ordered.  It  would  not 
remedy  all  the  ills  of  humanity.  Socialism  is  not 
a  panacea  :  there  are  no  panaceas  except  in  quack 
advertisements.  It  is  a  great  temptation  to  people 
enthusiastic  in  any  cause  to  claim  for  their  par- 
ticular proposals  that  they  will  bring  in  the  millen- 
nium, but  it  is  a  temptation  that  should  be  sternly 
resisted.  Let  us  take  warning  by  the  apostles  of 
democracy  and  the  disillusion  that  has  followed  the 


156    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

discovery  that  their  claims  for  it  were  absurdly 
exaggerated.  Socialism  is  an  economic  remedy  for 
certain  specific  economic  evils — a  remedy  resulting 
naturally  from  existing  conditions.  No  doubt  its 
effects  will  be  more  than  merely  economic,  like  those 
of  all  other  economic  changes,  but  we  can  form  no 
conception  of  what  those  extra- economic  effects 
will  be  and  we  had  better  not  indulge  in  prophecy. 

Perhaps  England  is  the  European  country  in 
which  the  conditions  are  most  suitable  to  a  Socialist 
experiment.  The  proletariat  is  the  great  majority 
of  the  population  and  we  have  the  immense  advan- 
tage of  having  no  peasant  proprietors.  The  indus- 
trial and  agricultural  proletariats  have  no  conflict- 
ing interests  and,  although  the  latter  was  until 
lately  sadly  neglected  by  the  Trade  Unionists, 
that  mistake  is  now  being  repaired.  The  agri- 
cultural organisation,  however,  still  needs  develop- 
ing, and  it  is  urgently  necessary  to  combine  all  the 
agricultural  workers  in, a  single  union.  The  other 
countries  where  the  conditions  are  suitable  to 
Socialism  are  Germany  and  Italy. 

In  nearly  all  the  rest  of  Europe  the  industrial 
proletariat  is  a  minority  and  the  peasant  pro- 
prietors form  a  solid  barrier  to  Socialism.  The 
danger  of  the  "  Green  International  "  is  not  yet 
sufficiently  recognised.  Nor  is  the  danger  that  a 
great  part  of  the  Continent  may  lapse  into  a  state 
of  semi-primitive  barbarism,  in  which  urban  civilisa- 


LIBERTARIAN  SOCIALISM  157 

tion  is  replaced  by  backward  peasant  Republics. 
There  is  no  evidence  that  a  world  revolution  is 
imminent.  Indeed,  the  situation  in  Europe  gener- 
ally is  less  revolutionary  than  it  was  two  years 
ago  and  in  most  countries  conservatism  and  re- 
action are  stronger.  The  appalling  conditions  of 
misery  and  famine  existing  in  several  countries 
seem  to  have  produced  passive  despair  rather  than 
revolutionary  feeling ;  in  Poland  they  are  com- 
patible with  bellicose  Nationalism.  Even  if,  in 
some  of  those  countries,  despair  should  at  last  lead 
to  violence,  Socialism,  if  it  came,  would  inherit 
nothing  but  ruins. 

In  any  case,  it  would  be  a  grave  error  to  imagine 
that  a  Socialist  society  will  issue  ready-made  from 
a  revolution  due  to  hunger.  "  A  social  order  is  not 
brought  into  being  without  a  long  preparation," 
and,  unless  that  preparation  precedes  the  revolu- 
tion, the  latter  "  is  doomed  in  advance  to  defeat 
and  counter-revolution."  In  the  great  industrial 
countries  the  preparation  is  already  in  an  advanced 
stage  ;  in  many  other  countries  it  is  only  beginning. 
The  great  industrial  countries  have  a  special 
responsibility.  It  is  their  duty  to  help  the  less 
advanced  countries,  and  to  that  end  it  is  essential 
to  maintain  the  unity  of  international  Trade 
Unionism  and  to  develop  and  extend  international 
relations  which  are  at  present  very  imperfectly 
organised. 


158    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

No  single  country  could  be  Socialist  while  the 
rest  of  the  world  remained  capitalist.  It  is  not 
even  certain  that  the  great  industrial  countries,  if 
they  adopted  Socialism,  could  hold  their  own 
against  hostile  peasant  Republics,  controlling  a 
great  part*  of  the  world's  food  supply.  In  all 
probability  Internationalism  must  precede  Social- 
ism and  the  latter  will  not  become  possible  until 
the  former  has  been  achieved.  The  immediate 
task  of  organised  Labour  is,  therefore,  to  create  the 
Universal  Federal  Republic  and  it  should  set  itself 
to  that  task  independently  of  the  Governments. 

The  Trade  Unions  should  begin  here  and  now  to 
build  up  "international  institutions  to  replace  the 
bourgeois  States.  The  appointment  of  Trade 
Union  ambassadors  from  each  country  to  the  others 
is  a  project  worth  considering.  The  international 
solidarity  of  the  proletariat  will  not  be  realised 
until  industrial  action  becomes  international.  No 
strike  should  be  declared  in  any  country  until  the 
organisations  in  other  countries  have  been  con- 
sulted and  a  Labour  Diplomatic  Service  seems 
necessary  to  make  prompt  consultation  possible. 
Had  such  a  service  existed  in  1914,  perhaps  the 
War  might  have  been  prevented  by  a  general  strike 
in  England,  France  and  Germany.  In  any  case, 
it  is  urgently  necessary  to  make  plans  for  such  a 
strike  in  the  event  of  any  future  threat  of  war  and  to 
take  measures  to  make  the  plans  effective.  The 
mistake,  into  which  even  Jaures  fell,  of  excepting 
the  case  of  a  "  defensive  "  war  must  not  be  repeated. 
We  now  know  how  easy  it  is  for  a  government  to 


LIBERTARIAN  SOCIALISM  159 

represent  any  war  as  being  defensive  on  its  part. 
"  II  faut  savoir  se  faire  declarer  la  guerre,"  as 
Frederick  the  Great  said.  In  1914  the  people  of 
every  belligerent  country  believed  that  the  War 
was  defensive  on  the  part  of  its  own  government  and 
in  every  case  the  belief  was  mistaken. 

At  the  same  time  organised  Labour  should  use 
political  and  direct  action  to  get  rid  of  passports, 
visas,  Alien  Laws,  restrictions  of  emigration  and 
immigration,  and  all  other  hindrances  to  freedom 
of  communications.  Whatever  the  pretexts  alleged 
for  these  restrictions,  their  real  purpose  is  to  increase 
the  powers  of  capitalist  governments  and  to  put  in 
their  hands  a  weapon  against  international  action 
on  the  part  of  the  proletariat.  Organised  Labour 
should  take  up  the  defence  of  personal  liberty, 
which  degenerate  Liberals  have  abandoned,  and 
rescue  it  from  the  encroachments  of  the  State.  It 
should  use  direct  and  political  action  to  obtain, 
in  the  words  of  the  resolution  unanimously  adopted 
by  the  International  Transport  Workers'  Congress 
at  Geneva  in  April  1921,  the  suppression  of  all 
"  artificial  restrictions,  by  Protective  Tariffs, 
Embargoes,  Controls  and  Prohibitions,  upon  the 
free  exchange  of  commodities  between  country  and 
country."  Universal  Free  Trade,  which  is  economic 
internationalism,  is  the  first  and  most  essential  step 
towards  making  war  impossible  and  international 
Socialism  possible. 

Backward  countries,  such  as  France,  the  British 
Dominions,  and  the  United  States  of  America,  will 
prevent  the  immediate  realisation  of  universal 


160    SOCIALISM  AND  PERSONAL  LIBERTY 

Free  Trade.  England  should  take  the  initiative, 
as  Mr  Maynard  Keynes  has  proposed,  in  forming  a 
League  of  Free  Trade  Nations.  The  members  of 
the  League  should  be  free,  if  they  please,  to  impose 
import  duties  against  countries  remaining  outside 
the  League,  but  this  freedom  need  not  necessarily 
be  used.  England,  at  any  rate,  should  maintain 
Free  Trade  with  all  countries  unless  and  until  the 
League  became  powerful  enough  to  force  every 
country  to  join  it  by  boycotting  those  that  remained 
outside.  For  the  imposition  of  import  duties  is  an 
act  of  economic  war  and,  in  healthy  international 
conditions,  will  be  treated  as  such.  It  should  also 
be  the  aim  of  organised  Labour  to  scrap  all  the 
Peace  Treaties  and  reorganise  Europe  on  the  basis 
of  self-determination  for  all  peoples,  including 
Ireland,  Austria,  Montenegro,  the  Tyrol,  and  all  the 
other  populations  to  which  the  Allied  Governments 
have  refused  it. 

This  international  preparation  for  the  new  social 
order  is  the  most  immediately  pressing,  but  it  need 
not  prevent  or  even  postpone  preparation  within 
each  nation.     England,  where  personal  liberty  was 
;    once  prized  more  highly  than  in  most  other  coun- 
tries, has  the  special  duty  of  pointing  the  way  to 
,    a  Socialism  recognising  the  truth  that  from  the  indi- 
'?  vidual  all  social  organisation  must  start  and  to  him 
\  it  must  return.     For  the  happiness  and  the  liberty 
of  the  individual  are  the  end  and  aim  of  all  society. 


PRINTED  BY  THE  EDINBURGH  PRESS,  9  AND    1  1  YOUNG  STREET. 


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